The Violet Hour
Great Writers at the End
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
The last days of five great thinkers, writers and artists - as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death
Katie Roiphe's extraordinary book is filled with intimate and surprising revelations. Susan Sontag, consummate public intellectual, finds her rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Seventy-six year old John Updike's response to a fatal diagnosis is to begin a poem. Dylan Thomas's fatal collapse on the floor of a Greenwich Village tavern is preceded by a fortnight of almost suicidal excess. Sigmund Freud understands his hastening decline. Maurice Sendak shows his lifelong obsession with death in his beloved books.
The Violet Hour - urgent and unsentimental - helps us to be less afraid in the face of death.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Struggling to come to terms with her own near-death experience and the loss of her father, author Katie Roiphe sought inspiration in the deaths of those she most admired. In The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, Roiphe paints intimate portraits of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, Dylan Thomas, John Updike and Maurice Sendak in their last hours and examines the role death played in their work. From Sontag’s deep denial of her mortality to Freud’s rational stoicism to Thomas’ wild excess, Roiphe shows that each of these icons died on their own terms. This meditative and healing read demystifies a taboo but deeply fascinating subject.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When acclaimed writer Roiphe (In Praise of Messy Lives) was 12, she contracted pneumonia. This book, she declares, had its origin in the hazy, fever-filled days she spent hovering between life and death. Roiphe explores, through mesmerizing storytelling, how six writers Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter confronted mortality. Drawing on her subjects' writing and on interviews with their friends and loved ones, she relates how they "embraced or evaded, made peace with or raged against death." When Sontag receives her breast cancer diagnosis, she steels herself to continue her work. Returning home after deciding on chemotherapy, Updike rests his head on his typewriter, as if resigned to never writing again, until his wife, Martha, says to him, "Just one more book." Freud faces his final days calmly, refusing painkillers, as if collecting notes for an essay about his own death. Thomas seems almost to long for death, while Sendak expresses pure terror in his stories and drawings. When Roiphe visits Salter, who died suddenly of a heart attack months after her visit, he tells her he doesn't think much about death. Roiphe's riveting profiles reveal a simple truth: each person faces death in a unique way.
