A tale of artistic endeavor with more agony than ecstasy—an insightful but uneven long-form scholarly essay.
French novelist and essayist Laurens (Who You Think I Am, 2017, etc.) considers the history and meanings surrounding Edgar Degas’ famous sculpture and the young woman who posed for it.
Young dancers gazing wistfully at Little Dancer Aged Fourteen will be sobered by this biography of the young woman, Marie van Goethem, who posed for its creator. In the book’s effective opening third, Laurens vividly sketches out a history of the abuses of child labor in Paris in the 1880s. At 14, Marie was not so much an aspiring and inspired dancer at the Paris Opera as someone forced to play walk-on roles to help support an impoverished family. At the barre, she joined other illiterate young girls, known as “little rats.” To supplement their meager pay, the teenage girls were encouraged to work the opera house’s foyer and its backstage areas, performing sexual favors for patrons. The girls’ mothers, Marie’s probably included, encouraged the assignations. No wonder, then, that Marie willingly endured physically painful postures for sculptor and painter Degas: The assignment paid better wages and freed the young woman from the advances of old men (Degas was largely indifferent to any sort of relationship). No wonder, too, that one critic described Degas’ rendering of Marie’s face as “sickly, grayish…old and drawn before its time.” Laurens brings her commentary up to date in a telling comparison of Degas’ work to images of Marilyn Monroe. In 1956, Monroe donned a tutu and posed next to the statue. The photos suggest, the author writes, “a ballerina overcome by loneliness, a soul sister ‘Little Sister.’" The narrative’s final third fails to cap the work, trailing off into unanswerable questions about Marie’s fate as a woman; the faint clues Laurens found about Marie’s adult life led nowhere. A somewhat opaque personal commentary describing the author’s deep feelings for the statue and its subject ends the work on a note of melancholy.
A tale of artistic endeavor with more agony than ecstasy—an insightful but uneven long-form scholarly essay.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-958-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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