Reviews for Translating lives

The average rating for Translating lives based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-06-30 00:00:00 Bolano Roy What an odd, damaged pair they made, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Both came from families dominated by lying, philandering fathers. Dash idolized his much put-upon mother and hated his father, swearing never to be like him, but went on to become a drunk and a womanizer himself, betraying every woman he was with and running from every possibility of emotional intimacy; Lillian despised her doormat mother and swore never to put up with such betrayal and mistreatment, sure she would never settle for less than devotion and fidelity, yet her most important relationship was with a drunken womanizer incapable of commitment and terrified of intimacy. Their tangled, complicated relationship was the most important in both their lives, but it was never all that either of them wanted; it may, however, have been all that either of them could manage. Their output as writers was strange, too. Dash wrote important, influential work but wrote almost nothing in the last decades of his life, sinking into alcoholism, fatally limited by his refusal to confront deeper emotions in himself or in his fiction, trapped by the model of stoic, defensive masculinity he did so much to represent in his fiction and couldn't get away from in his life. She was an important playwright but her best work was written early on with Dash acting as fierce editor; as he became increasingly unable (or unwilling) to play that role, her plays grew less successful and her confidence shrank. The series of memoirs she published after his death was enormously successful but was full of self-serving obfuscations and outright fabrications; any suggestion that she was ever less than truthful, though, was met with fury. And she was good at fury. Tortured by his refusal to be all to her that she wanted when he lived, she was determined to make him hers after his death. And God help anyone who got in the way. Fierce characters, both of them, not admirable in the whole but compelling and strong.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-24 00:00:00 Bethan Hunter Fascinating account of the romantic and professional relationship between Dashiel Hammett and Lillian Hellman. Hammett was the Hemingway of crime novelists and Hellman a playwright and memoirist. Their works were made into Hollywood films, such as Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON and THE THIN MAN and Hellman's WATCH ON THE RHINE and THE LITTLE FOXES. In Mellen's joint biography, neither writer fares well as a person. This is a not just a "warts and all" retelling, it is a warts IS all casting of Hellman and Hammett. Hellman is a life long liar who often fabricates incidences in her life, privately and publicly; she is deeply insecure about her unattractiveness and apparently compensates through sexual aggression. Hammett is the classic drunk, sometimes charming and sometimes not, and a womanizer without conscience. Mellen does not spare either party. Hammett always avoiding responsibility and always blindly championing Joseph Stalin and soviet communism. Hellman became a favorite of the left and feminists largely because her fabrications were believed true. Their lives ended badly with Dash penniless, sick and dependent on Lillian in his last years, and Lillian alone in her last days, fiercely defending herself against literary and public criticism of her published fabrications, while in failing health and with the onset of blindness. Mellen's writing is uncompromising and her book scrambles the chronology to give each chapter a theme of its own.