Word: yourcenar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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COUP DE GRÂCE (151 pp.) - Marguerite Yourcenar - Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
Bleak Theme. Marguerite Yourcenar has set down the story of the doomed Baltic civilization in a fable so barely told (in translation from the French) as to suggest basic English. It suits her bare, bleak theme. Her narrator is Erick von Lohmond of the Teutonic gentry. Too young for World War I, he grows up into one of the crudest of civil wars. The Red soldiers who come sweeping through the Baltic birch forests so hate the Czarist military system that when they capture a White officer they nail his hated epaulets to his shoulders or, because the officers...
...White soldier, who usually performs the executions with his pistol, comes to Erick and reports: "She orders . . . that is, Miss Sophie asks . . She wants it to be you." Erick obliges. His first shot blows half her face away. "On the second shot everything was over." With this, Novelist Yourcenar (Hadrian's Memoirs, TIME, Nov. 29, 1954) contrives to inject her own sharp sense of history in what is told within the emotional limits of three private destinies...
...than men have won the prestigious Prix Femina (awarded by an all-woman jury), and more than 60 novels by women were thought to have enough merit to become candidates for the major literary awards. In a class by themselves are the prizewinning historical studies-51-year-old Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian's Memoirs (TIME, Nov. 29) and 38-year-old Zoé Oldenbourg's The Cornerstone (TIME, Jan. 10). But, like Colette, few of the ladies write historicals or go to libraries for material. They supply their own, proving themselves much bolder practitioners of the entre...
Hadrian's Memoirs, by Marguerite Yourcenar. A first-rate novel about the great soldier-emperor who first called Rome eternal (TIME...