The latest gem in the publisher’s already glittering Eminent Lives series.
Brief but illuminating biography of the troubled and troubling French poet.
Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) composed revolutionary verse, carried on a wild, sometimes violent love affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, then abandoned his muse and pursued lucre in Africa. Prolific novelist/memoirist/biographer White (Hotel de Dream, 2007, etc.) offers a lucid, literate introduction to the poet’s short but turbulent life. He begins with a personal connection, recalling his elation when, as a troubled gay adolescent, he discovered Rimbaud’s verse and homosexuality. White moves swiftly through his subject’s spectacular early student career, up-and-down relationship with his mother (to whose home he continually returned, even in his most frenetic phases), voracious reading, early experiments with verse, lifelong wanderlust and ill-fated relationship with Verlaine. It was 16-year-old Rimbaud who made contact; Verlaine, a far more celebrated poet at the time, recognized the boy’s talent and invited him to Paris. Before their affair was over, the older man had left his wife, destroyed his reputation and spent two years in jail for shooting Rimbaud through the wrist. Nonetheless, White shows, Verlaine remained his tormentor’s strongest supporter. No one really knows for certain why Rimbaud abandoned literature and intransigently refused to return to it, preferring to labor in a rock quarry, run guns or trade ivory. White speculates that he was driven by greed and perhaps a desire to start fresh far away from Paris and London, where his reputation had been sullied by his sexual escapades, among other things. Unsurprisingly, the author offers insightful commentary on Rimbaud’s verse as well.
The latest gem in the publisher’s already glittering Eminent Lives series.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-934633-15-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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