The man in the red coat /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020Copyright date: �2020Edition: First United States editionDescription: 265 pages : illustrations (some color), portraits ; 22 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780525658771
- 0525658777
- 618.10092 B 23
- RG76.P69 B37 2020
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Biography | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | B POZZI BARNES (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022351055 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending --a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, told through the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon, Samuel Pozzi. * "A pleasure to read in every way." -- The New York Times Book Review
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Époque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people (Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among many others), place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice, and nativism--with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Époque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people (Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Proust, James Whistler, among many others), place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure, but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice, and nativism-with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Epoque; an illuminating look at the longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France; and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.
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Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
In summer 1885, three Frenchmen arrived together in London, among them Samuel Pozzi, a surgeon and man of science important enough to get himself painted by John Singer Sargent (Dr. Pozzi at Home, in which Pozzi is swathed in a long red dressing gown). Man Booker Prize-winning Barnes uses Pozzi's life and particularly his London trip to give us a tour of Belle Epoque France and its relationship to Britain.Publishers Weekly Review
Inspired by seeing John Singer Sargent's portrait of Samuel Jean Pozzi at the National Gallery in London, Booker Prize--winner Barnes (The Only Story) investigates the life of the 19th-century French "society doctor" in this wry, essayistic, and art-filled account. Crediting Pozzi with "transforming French gynaecology from a mere subdivision of general medicine into a discipline in its own right," Barnes sketches his subject's relationships with Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde, among others, and illuminates the Belle Époque in France, a period that might retroactively appear as "a last flowering of a settled high society," but at the time felt more like "an age of neurotic, even hysterical national anxiety." Beginning with Pozzi's June 1885 trip to London, Barnes episodically charts the doctor's rise from "Bergerac boy to Parisian high society," recounting his marriage to a railroad heiress; his numerous affairs, including with actress Sarah Bernhardt; and his advancement of modern medical procedures. Barnes's wit ("bad smells are good reminders") and expert plundering of source material (the Princess of Monaco called Pozzi "disgustingly handsome") add a lightness of touch that counterbalances the heavy load of names, dates, and obscure historical events. Full of admiration and deep feeling for its "progressive, international, and constantly inquisitive" subject, this sparkling account takes on added resonance in a moment marked by a return of nativism. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi, Inc. (Feb.)Booklist Review
Barnes (The Only Story, 2018) returns to nonfiction to present a fascinating study focused on Samuel Jean de Pozzi, a French gynecologist, pioneering surgeon, politician, womanizer, and omnipresent celebrity in Belle Époque France. Barnes begins with a trip Pozzi took to London with Prince de Polignac and Count de Montesquiou-Fezensac. Pozzi treated the dandies, aesthetes, and artists of the period for the ailments caused by their sexual (mis)adventures, drugs, or the many duels of the age. Originating from a middle-class background, Pozzi rose to share the same circles as the most lauded artists of the age, befriending figures such as Sarah Bernhardt (a lifelong friend and possible lover), Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Indeed, Wilde constantly reappears in this work, as Barnes explores how his own relationship with Wilde's writing has changed over the years. In this wryly humored historical sketch of an incredibly complex and influential era, Pozzi is a fascinating conduit for Barnes to provide intriguing anecdotes, numerous photographs and paintings, ruminations on the act of biography, and many provocative connections to the present.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2020 BooklistKirkus Book Review
A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque.When Barnes (The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent's striking portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzihandsome, "virile, yet slender," dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coathe was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist; a magazine article called him "not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients." The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. "I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi," the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled; Pozzi was a "man of rare good sense and rare good taste," "filled with knowledge and purpose" as well as "grace and charm." The author's portrait, as admiring as Sargent's, depicts a "hospitable, generous" man, "rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled," and brilliant. The cosmopolitan Pozzi, his supercilious friend Montesquiou, and "gentle, whimsical" Edmond de Polignac are central characters in Barnes' irreverent, gossipy, sparkling history of the belle epoque, "a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honor." Dueling, writes the author, "was not just the highest form of sport, it also required the highest form of manliness." Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt (who adored Pozzi), Henry James and Proust, Pozzi's diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more.Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist's sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
JULIAN BARNES is the author of twenty-three previous books, for which he has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the French Prix Médicis and Prix Femina; the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.There are no comments on this title.