While occasionally crotchety about personal travails, Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of “our poet of the...
A typically sharp-eyed, tart tour by longtime New Yorker writer Malcolm (The Crime of Sheila McGough, 1999, etc.) to the places—and the creative landscape—associated with the Russian master.
Playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) has become as misunderstood as he is beloved, Malcolm feels, not just by critics but by his homeland. As she travels to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and especially Gurzuv and Yalta (where Chekhov spent his last five years), Malcolm fumes at post-Communist Russia—not just at inconveniences such as lost luggage and seedy hotels, but at guides who sometimes seem more interested in palaces or old-time film star Deanna Durbin than they do in Chekhov. She grumps about this “absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an ‘original scene’ that can only fall short of his expectations.” Occasionally, Malcolm resorts to one of her trademark cranky generalities about factual writing (a novice journalist, she insists, who wishes to render subjects “in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused”). But once she considers Chekhov’s life and work in earnest, her numerous insights run against the critical grain without falling into contrarianism for its own sake. For instance, she notes that far from being nonjudgmental, Chekhov underscores the nature of evil in stories such as “Ward No. 6”; that despite his overriding concern with ordinary lives, he was irresistibly attracted to useless beauty; and that, as someone who battled tuberculosis for almost a third of his life, his masterpieces obliquely tell what it is like to live under the constant shadow of death. She seamlessly stitches together both standard biographical information (such as his attitude toward his brutal and improvident father) and close analysis and interpretation (e.g., of memoirists’ varying accounts of Chekhov’s death, including the bizarre transport of his corpse back to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car filled with oysters).
While occasionally crotchety about personal travails, Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of “our poet of the provisional and fragmentary.”Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50668-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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IN THE NEWS
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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