Another triumph for one of the most versatile and engaging of all contemporary writers.
The Indian-born poet (The Golden Gate, 1986) and novelist (A Suitable Boy, 1993) extends his already impressive range with this replete family memoir.
It’s the story of Seth’s London-based great-uncle (his grandfather’s brother) Shanti Behari Seth and Shanti’s German-Jewish wife Hennerle (“Henny”), with whom young “Vicky” lived when he came from Calcutta to attend university in London in 1969. Part One of this most artfully constructed book juxtaposes Seth’s own somewhat discordant educational and career experiences, while affectionately portraying the personality traits (Uncle Shanti’s kindhearted fussiness, Aunt Henny’s slightly nervous dignified reserve) that somehow made them a perfectly matched couple. Then, following her death and his decade of bereavement, Seth explores Shanti’s life (details provided by both “interviews” and correspondence): his studies in 1930s Berlin, patient courtship of Henny Caro (who would not marry him until many years later), departure for England when Third Reich regulations disallowed Shanti from practicing his chosen profession of dentistry and wartime service, during which an exploded shell destroyed his right arm. The absorbing third section is Henny’s story, told mostly through the agonized letters she exchanged with family and friends in wartime Germany, after she had emigrated to England. Marred only by a ten-page digression in which Seth analyzes German culture and history’s “possible influence in the present century,” this is an immensely moving narrative: a splendid small book within a book. Subsequently, Seth details Shanti’s and Henny’s expatriate marriage, then leaps ahead to Shanti’s ailing, deranged last years alone (he died shortly before his 90th birthday), concluding with a summation of their story’s relationship to Seth’s own life—which he has undertaken to explore in “a double biography, an intertwined meditation, where the author is an anomalous third braid.” Seth’s voice is a fluent, graceful and compassionate one, and the story he tells—in a sense, it’s every family’s story—should have irresistible appeal.
Another triumph for one of the most versatile and engaging of all contemporary writers.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059966-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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