Deft, poignant characterizations by an author who deserves a wider readership.
A new translation of Russian novelist Grossman’s delightful journal of his stay among the Armenians.
Composed two years before his death in 1964, this journal records the author’s reflections on the Armenian people among whom he lived for two months in 1961 as a “translator” for a famous Armenian novelist, Rachiya Kochar, although Grossman didn’t speak Armenian. Rather, rewriting his novel in collaboration with the vain, large-living author, Grossman, who was occasionally gripped by bowel trouble from the early stages of kidney cancer he was unaware of, moved among the humble, mountain-dwelling Armenians and found them enormously sympathetic, salt-of-the-earth people whose diversity, national pride and piety contrasted sharply with the Russian temperament. In this sprightly translation by the Chandler husband-and-wife team, who previously tackled Grossman’s Everything Flows and The Road, Grossman’s character sketches, executed with swift, loving strokes, provide simply charming reading. The author digresses as nimbly about the master craftsmen of Russian stoves found in the homes of the high-mountain villagers (“what quantities of bread, what a great deal of cabbage, how much living warmth his stoves have given birth to!”) as he does the touching customs of a rustic wedding he attended. Living among the Armenians, he witnessed a kind of timeless biblical nobility he conveys with artless simplicity in his own work.
Deft, poignant characterizations by an author who deserves a wider readership.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59017-618-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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