I Wish You Love: Conversations with Marlene Dietrich

by Eryk Hanut

Book Overview

Marlene Dietrich's film career spanned six decades, until she retired in 1976 to live her life as a recluse. While living in Paris in the 1980s, Hanut wrote to Dietrich, expressing his admiration for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1883319471
• ISBN13: 9781883319472
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Frog
• Length: 138 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.2" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

More lucid than most humanity has the privilege to be

First it must be said that take what Marlene Dietrich says literaly, without reporting ourselves to the particular humour of germans intelectuals of her generation, Brecht included, is misunderstand it all. It it also well to remember the habits of a class that had "épater les bourgeois" as a habit. With Marlene ich word has many meanings and, some times, a little box contains a bigger one inside and then another, and another one. Few knew how to deal with the notion that truth is the multiple illusions of truth, and play so sharply with it. Most of the times for will of good, even if this good was her path towards the liberty of a precipice edge.Then it is remarkable the incredibly effective way she educates Hanut by telephone. And, for one time, Marlene achieves her education efforts. Hanut, after she was no more there to scream at him, became not a suicidal desperate boy, but a quite interessing man publishing a series of books, with titles that seem the fruit of a research of himself and wisdom. It is not important if Marlene should agree with the conclusions of this books. It is important that she got him from the pit and made him meet the force to continue to live with dignity and to discover his way. One has to admire the cleverness of her method, hidden in apparent casuality. To do this one may drink, take pills, but one must be more lucid than most of humanity has the privilege to be.

An extraordinary story of friendship and love

An unusually fine celebrity memoir surfaces in Eryk Hanut's I WISH YOU LOVE-CONVERSATIONS WITH MARLENE DIETRICH.for several years before Dietrich's death, in 1992, at the age of 91, Hanut, a young dane living in Paris,carried on wide-ranging phone chats with the aged star.Hanut's records of these talks reveal Dietrich as an intelligent woman of fiery opinion, and the author as a sensitive soul who here offers neither hagiography nor indictment ,but a tender,thoughtful appreciation of a woman turned legend PUBLISHERS WEEKLY April 1996

This is a compelling and fascinating true story.

I think that the "Kirkus Review"totally misrepresents (as it does for many good books)the essence of this really interesting account of Dietrich's last years.I have read many books about Dietrich, studied and enjoyed her films and find this a beautifully moving portrayal of a true and wonderful friendship. Howard Kissel, in " The New York Daily News" called it "well written" and "compelling"; Many details in the book about Dietrich's life were unknown to me and I appreciated the author's subtle analysis of her fame and the way she dealt with it; To conclude, I find this book refreshing because it is also mostly about gratitude; and not one more "dysfunctional family saga" as in the Mommie Dearest tradition.