Dyer writes two books at once, his own life and a challenging life of D.H. Lawrence, in this unique performance. This wrestling match with Lawrence reveals the author and his subject as finely matched opponents who ultimately shake hands on the nature of life and art. Dyer's record of his time spent exhaustively studying Lawrence is both tormented and comic. He ``rages'' at his very goals and against the compulsion to write, while also tracing, intermittently, Lawrence's own life's itinerary. In a sense, the project is a doomed undertaking. For could there be any less auspicious literary pursuit than formalizing the process of going ``from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of the to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either . . .''? Chagrined by his ambivalence, seduced by his indecisiveness, Dyer aspires to the ``floaty indifference of contentment'' and comes to prefer Lawrence's manuscripts to the final texts. He longs for freedom, yet his gateway into Lawrence comes in a moment of raging indolence. Convinced that Lawrence's ``writing urges us back to the source,'' Dyer traces the other writer's footsteps. Taos and Oaxaca, Sardinia and Eastwood are important backdrops along the way. Such scenery lures Dyer into a dialogue with Lawrence's mentors and tormentors and into the heat and chill of the arguments they waged. Larkin, Brodsky, and Julian Barnes are poetic referees in the ring. The push-me-pull-me here of the text and the sub-text, of biography and autobiography, turns up the volume on this fascinating symbiosis, which casts a new light on creativity and the importance of destiny.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-86547-533-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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