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S'està carregant… The Eitingons: a twentieth-century story (2009)de Mary-Kay Wilmers
   Cap No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra.  3   rebeccanyc | May 20, 2010 | 
 Wilmers’s adventures in digging through their lost world makes Mary-Kay one of the book’s most intriguing characters. She savors the vagaries of biographical research (“He addressed me at all times as if addressing the General Assembly of the UN with his shoe in his hand”), and her determination to shine a light into the shadier corners of her family’s past brings together the three very different protagonists, making The Eitingons less a traditional family history than a story of how some people seek to recover their memories, and how some seek to lose them.  The Eitingons offers glimpses of an extraordinary range of worlds. To have a family that was there at the birth of psychoanalysis and of Stalinism – at the heart of both – is a considerable literary asset and a fabulous starting point for an exploration of histories, written and rewritten, secrets, lies and different types of truth. But sometimes it feels just a bit too much like wandering through a deep, dark Russian forest, desperate for a pathway, or a clearing, or just a shaft of light. What this book needs, I'm afraid – this book written by a woman who has edited the London Review of Books for 17 years – is a ruthless editor. Then it could have been not just a fascinating, but a truly gripping read. Mary-Kay Wilmers's The Eitingons (Faber) is a secret history of the 20th century in which members of her family played a crucial role – one in the fur trade after the Russian revolution; another as an early disciple of Freud's; and a third, an agent of Stalin's, who set up the assassination of Trotsky. The fact that this last one was the most fun, or at least the most fascinating, is an aspect of the book's originality. I found the book a riveting piece of story-telling.
A family history that explores the KGB, the fur trade, Freud and the assassination of Trotsky Leonid Eitingon was a KGB assassin who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico, helping to organize the assassination of Trotsky. "As long as I live," Stalin said, "not a hair of his head shall be touched." It did not work out like that. Max Eitingon was a psychoanalyst, a colleague, friend and protégé of Freud's. He was rich, secretive and--through his friendship with a famous Russian singer-- implicated in the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in 1937. Motty Eitingon was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, questioned by the FBI. Was Motty everybody's friend or everybody's enemy? Mary-Kay Wilmers, best known as the editor of the London Review of Books, began looking into aspects of her remarkable family twenty years ago. The result is a book of astonishing scope and thrilling originality that throws light into some of the darkest corners of the last century. At the center of the story stands the author herself--ironic, precise, searching, and stylish--wondering not only about where she is from, but about what she's entitled to know. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)909History and Geography History World historyLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (3.25)
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