The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End

by Katie Roiphe

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.

• ISBN10: 0349008507
• ISBN13: 9780349008509
• Publish Date: 8 March 2016
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Imprint: Virago Press Ltd
• Edition: Digital original
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 75000
• Language: English

Reviews

[Beth C.]

I was initially interested in this because I presumed it was writers doing what they do best - writing. Only this time, they were writing about their own unbeatable illnesses, or the spectre of death that follows us all around. What I actually read was a book about these great writers and the end of their days. Nothing inherently wrong with that...except that, often, I found the writing long and drawn out - far past the point of where anything needed to be. It felt almost as if, during the writing, the author was hoping that the longer she wrote, the more death itself would make sense. Unfortunately, death often *doesn't* make sense to those around us, other than being the end that everyone will greet - some sooner than others.

Sadly, I was only able to get about halfway through before I simply could not read anymore. It's rare that I abandon a book (more from simple stubborn refusal), but - this one I did. I'm sure there will be some who might truly get something out of this, or value what they perceive as possible insights given - but as with beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. And these eyes simply could not continue the long slog.