"Coco Chanel: A biography" - Axel Madsen

Coco Chanel: A Biography
By Axel Madsen
1990 Bloomsbury
388 pages

First published in 1990, Axel Madsen's biography of Coco Chanel has been recently reprinted widely, unsurprisingly considering the immense renewed interest in her life, most marked by the release of two films (Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky and Coco Après Chanel, both 2009) and one disastrous TV movie (Coco Chanel in 2008) about the legendary designer. Where the TV movie was almost unwatchable, Madsen's narrative was barely readable.

Basics first. The book is poorly written. I seriously doubt whether the editor even read it before sending it off to the presses. Chanel's scintillating and eventful life is conveyed with a tediously unvarying use of language. Most sentences either with a noun, a pronoun, or a definite or indefinite article. Some paragraphs are composed entirely of clichéd sentences, reversing the desired effect of romance to nausea. Bloomsbury should also revise its fonts. This one's hieroglyphic touch was laborious to plough through.

In terms of substance, Madsen tries hard to piece together Chanel's story, and to his credit he doesn't spend too much time trying to figure out which of Chanel's accounts is true. Over her lifetime, Chanel may have given several different versions of an incident or whole episode of her life to different friends or acquaintances. Still, when it comes to narrative, there is little Madsen tells us that we don't already know. If anything Madsen strengthen's clichés we all know about Mlle Chanel, never failing to back up some story with one of her famous, curt sayings. One gets little sense of who Chanel was a person. Perhaps this is impossible to accomplish anyway, since she did not keep a diary, nor wrote letters, was generally quite distrustful of people and hence very secretive. Chanel did not believe that she knew anyone who didn't want anything from her, including her friends. She never let anyone close enough to really know her and hurt her. Madsen refers to Chanel as "Gabrielle" (her birth name), "Coco" and "Chanel" interchangeably throughout the text. While some may find this confusing, it is appropriate considering Chanel's stages of personhood, the ones of the past arguably never leaving her despite her success.

Madsen's book is good for a general sketch of Coco Chanel's life, but it's a stylistically stodgy read, and far from intimate portrait. Don't expect any surprises, either. You won't get any.

"Home: A Memoir of My Early Years" - Julie Andrews

Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
By Julie Andrews
2009 Pheonix
384 pages

I rarely read biographies of the living. They seem premature and unfinished attempts to cash in on stars that might be forgotten too soon after they die. With even less frequency do I read autobiographies, usually composed of the desperate attempts for public sympathy, often through hypocritical self-pitying and abuse of their equally famous peers, or to clear their name by settling some score or another. But we're talking about Dame Julie here. I grew up on her musicals; Sound of Music, Mary Poppins and Thoroughly Modern Millie, and hardly little else. The smallest credit I could do to my celebrity godmother was read her memoirs. And I can truthfully declare: I can hardly remember when I last read such delightful pages of autobiographical writing.

The memoirs start with her grandparents, and end with her signing a contract with Disney for Mary Poppins. The early chapters of biographies are often my special favourites, precisely because one can read about everything that one does not already know about the subject in question. Home was such a read throughout. It's written pleasantly, with a clear voice, and Andrews proves herself to possess a charming sense of humour. I often found myself laughing out loud.

She also stays far away from a "rags to riches" fabrication that now and then creeps into celebrity autobiographies. The depiction of her early years is surprisingly steady. Readers are not fed her life's watershed moments in ready packages. Her successes are weaved evenly into a well-paced narrative of her life, both private and professional. In that sense the narration has an unexpectedly calming rhythm carrying one forward. In addition to the lack of narcissistic self-deprecation, Andrews does not try to vilify any of her past peers. For every unpleasant disclosure about other celebrity, she always compensates accordingly with perhaps more than generous compliments. Such generosity in some cases is hardly necessary, since many of the personages this concerns are already dead and their vices already general knowledge, like Rex Harrisson and Richard Burton.

Perhaps the most novel revelation contained in these pages concern her stepfather's attempted sexual abuse when she was a child. Even this she does not dwell on, and refuses to transform it into life's trauma. She recognises they great favour he did her by first recognising her voice as her greatest talent, but also skilfully weaves in his unwelcome place in her life, and how his person gradually disintegrated into alcoholism.

Andrews chose a perfect point in which to close her story. We all, after all, know her career track since Mary Poppins, of the films that came thereafter and her marriage to Blake Edwards. Someday it might also be interesting to read Andrews' account of her years as a superstar, both in film and on stage, but even if that volume is never written, I at least will remain completely satisfied with this charming account of her formative years. Whole-heartedly recommended reading to all fellow Julie fans!

"Michel Foucault" - Didier Eribon; "The Passion of Michel Foucault" - James Miller

Michel Foucault
By Didier Eribon (translated by Betsy Wing)
1991 Harvard University Press

374 pages

The Passion of Michel Foucault
By James Miller
2000 Harvard University Press
492 pages

The repertoire of literature on this French philosopher with a cult-like following can be said to be endless, as it seems is the amount of literature by him. In addition to his own books, there are interviews, articles, newspaper articles, letters and not to mention the famous Collège de France lectures that are still being transcribed and translated for all Foucault lovers.

Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault was the first biography I have read on one of the defining thinkers of the last century, and it was not a disappointment. Work on the biography clearly began not soon after Foucault's death. Owing to the endless of interviews with Foucault's friends and peers in the 1980s (Yves Montand, Gilles Deleuze, etc.), many of whom are now deceased, it is a work pieced together from various exceptional accounts of those close to Foucault himself. While Eribon's personal proximity to Foucault as well as his writing so soon after his death certainly tempers his account, there are several anecdotes and details that bring Foucault to life. One gets the strong impression of how his work was very much a part of his life, that he wrote from and was inspired by the experience of his own life. While it is known that Foucault was politically active in the 1970s, it may come as a surprise to many to find out the extent of his relentless activism.

Eribon's portrait is of course his own, with its own embellishments and blind-spots. One major shortcoming can be attributed to Eribon's intimacy with Foucault's circle as well as the climate of the time. Eribon is incredibly candid on the subject of Foucault's homosexuality and contraction of HIV/AIDS. While no secret is made of Foucault's homosexuality, the narration steers clear of going into details of how Foucault was infected with HIV or how he lived with it. Something very surprising considering the proximity of sexuality and disease to Foucault in his oeuvre. The finale was nonetheless crushing to read, how the virus gradually overcame his ability to live, and the sadness pervading the account of the end is devastating.

Eribon's omissions are to a degree compensated in James Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault. In the introduction Miller tells us that Foucault's partner Daneil Defert was displeased with Eribon's volume. Miller doesn't specify the reasons why, and I have not as yet been able to ascertain the accuracy of this assertion, but such a claim certainly serves the interests of Miller's own biography of Foucault, which I found decidedly inferior. The most fascinating pieces of information are derived from secondary sources, often from Eribon's text, and as such it is no surprise that Miller is so brief on Foucault's childhood... Still, Miller does explore HIV/AIDS in much more detail and frankness. Yet, there is something disturbingly un-Foucauldian about this attempt to explain Foucault's disease, to discover its source and describe its symptoms and his experience. No doubt this is also why Foucault was silent on the matter at the time as well, and his cause of death initially hushed from the public.

The gulf between the two biographies on this point serves better to ask more questions rather than answer the obvious ones. In short, it reminds us that biography is a dubious genre. It perceives life, excavates its forms, and seeks to convey that life to others in a coherent timeline. Moreover, biography seeks to make lives explainable. We so much want to understand the times, ours and the past, and the personages that passed through them, and this demands we create narratives. But how do we create narratives that escape the customary history-telling that Foucault spent his life trying to transform, to which Miller arguably succumbs.

Foucault in his study

"Rudolf Nureyev: The Life" -- Julie Kavanagh

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life
By Julie Kavanagh
2008 Penguin
848 pages

This summer I embarked on the labour of reading Julie Kavanagh's opus on Nureyev. It is an expertly researched text. It is extraordinary to read page after page of detailed documentation of Nureyev's life, especially of his younger years, from his earliest days in Ufa to the fulfillment of his dream to dance in the Kirov Ballet. Much more is known of Nureyev's life from his defection onwards, to joining the Royal Ballet where he teamed up with Margot Fonteyn to form one of the most legendary ballet partnerships in history. Incidentally, the BBC Four is airing a TV movie of Fonteyn's life Margot as a part of its Women We Loved Season (Gracie Fields and Enid Blyton are the other two, the latter played by Helena Bonham-Carter... looking forward to that).

It is common, if not somewhat expected, that a biographer is empathetic towards their subject, sometimes so much so that they end up excusing their mistakes too easily. Kavanagh sustains an intelligent balance between her evident desire to understand Nureyev and a critical attitude to his misdemeanors. She remains throughout the book aware of the difficulties of Nureyev's character; how it affected his relationship with his colleagues, the ballet companies he danced in, and most of all his intimate relationships, both friends and lovers. Gifted as he was, the demands of his inflated sense of self-worth were regularly destructive in his relationships. Perhaps only towards the end of his life, when he was struggling against HIV/AIDS while continuing to overwork himself, did he become aware of his fallibility, and to a degree, came to terms with it. In conclusion, if one wants to read a biography about Nureyev, this is the one to read.