A potent narrative that builds from matter-of-fact observation through horrific experience toward a metaphysical acceptance...
Subtle meditation and devastating detail combine in this journalistic memoir of refugee landings on the Italian island of Lampedusa.
A prizewinning playwright in his native Italy, Enia (On Earth as It Is in Heaven, 2014, etc.) relies on the skills he sharpened as a journalist to recount the often deadly plight of exiles traveling over treacherous waters from Africa to Europe. Yet those depths also provide a backdrop for more intimate accounts—of a close friend who succumbed to cancer and an uncle who is suffering the same. In the aftermath of a particularly calamitous shipwreck—only 155 survivors landed on Lampedusa of the more than 500 who had begun the voyage—one rescuer observed, “It’s normal, isn’t it? You see someone in the water, you lean over from the deck of the boat and you do your best to grab him. Anyone who sees a person drowning does whatever he can to rescue him. It’s not like we’re heroes, after all.” Such instinctive decency triumphs over polarized politics or fear of the “other”—a fear that can go both ways, as many of the African refugees have apparently never seen white skin before. The author’s companion witness on the island is his father, a retired physician–turned-photographer who is both loving and reticent. The two communicate through the words the son writes, the images the father captures, and the silences that are pregnant with meaning between the two. “In doing portraits of faces, my father could sense the disintegration of life,” writes Enia, continuing, “it was my father’s way of trying to start a dialogue with God Himself, a dialogue that contained both an effort to understand and a conscious abandonment of self to the mystery of existence.” Like the sea itself, that mystery is fathoms deep, encapsulated in a multilayered narrative that attempts to come to terms with the universality of mortality.
A potent narrative that builds from matter-of-fact observation through horrific experience toward a metaphysical acceptance that is something like a state of grace.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-908-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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