Slim, fragmented memories of the daughter that Lacan and readers barely knew.
A brief memoir in snapshots by the daughter of famed French psychologist Jacques Lacan.
By the time Sibylle Lacan (1940-2013) was born, her father had not only abandoned her mother and siblings; he had another daughter on the way. The author and her siblings would retain their father’s surname, but he officially erased all mention of them from his professional life, from his listing in Who’s Who, and even from his office, where he had a single photo of his youngest daughter with his second wife: “To his patients, to us, to me, for over twenty years, my father seemed to be saying: Here is my daughter, my only daughter, here is my darling daughter.” Since her father was already gone from the household by the time of her birth, and their relationship ever after was sporadic, his presence in her life was mainly an absence, which became a black hole of depression: “Impossible to study, to learn, to recall,” she writes. “Always the same weariness, that foggy sensation, the same absence of emotion. My life was hell.” She wanted her father to save her, but the best he could do was to refer her to other analysts. “He was an intermittent father,” she writes. “A father in fragments.” This choppy memoir is as much about the author’s own emotional disappearance into the ether as her father’s presence or absence in her life. Many of the passages are less than a page, a paragraph of a couple of sentences; very few extend over more than two pages. For the author, closure only came after her father’s death—despite a “doubly sinister” funeral in which her own family felt like bit players. Several years later, she visited his grave, “laid my hand on the icy stone until it burned,” and finally felt reconciliation.
Slim, fragmented memories of the daughter that Lacan and readers barely knew.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-262-03931-4
Page Count: 104
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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