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Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire by Judith Thurman
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What Humans Want
A Review by Brigitte Frase

Judith Thurman's book of essays possesses the three cardinal virtues of nonfiction: Its prose is stylish and often witty; it delves into various topics with hungry curiosity, and it is very, very intelligent. Thurman takes her subjects seriously, giving the same respect and in-depth analysis to "Hump the Grinder's Hair Wars" as she does to the novels of Gustave Flaubert.

All but one of the pieces were first published in the New Yorker magazine over the past 20 years. They begin as reviews -- of books, art, fashion -- and then ripen and deepen into psychologically astute essays. As the biographer of two complex, often maddening women -- Isak Dinesen and Colette -- Thurman became a wily and resourceful spy in the domain of desire: our hungers for sex and love, of course, but also for attention, power, danger, catharsis, degradation, self-erasure, for new sensations, for beauty or perfection, and also for the despoilment of beauty and perfection, without which there can be no...
 
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In 1977, two years after coming through Stage IV breast cancer, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a brilliant and cogently argued polemic about the punitive or sentimental fantasies that certain diseases -- such as tuberculosis in the 19th century and cancer in the 20th -- attracted. What...




 

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