A richly detailed history chronicles a family’s pain.
A prominent literary family reflects Spain’s tumultuous past.
Making his book debut, journalist Shulman creates a deeply researched portrait of the Paneros, one of Spain’s most notorious families: patriarch Leopoldo (1909-1962), a well-regarded poet during the Franco dictatorship; his unhappy wife, Felicidad; and his three tormented sons. The author’s fascination with the family began in 2012, when he watched El desencanto, a documentary made in 1976, in which Felicidad and her adult sons spoke candidly about their relationships with Leopoldo and one another, revealing anger, bitterness, and loneliness. The movie elevated the Paneros “into a cultural phenomenon,” Shulman writes, and sparked his own interest in the family’s “refreshing weirdness, poetic obsessions, and sacrilegious taste for destruction.” He is not alone in responding to their “lasting magnetism.” They have inspired academic studies, fiction, poetry, songs, films, memoirs, volumes of correspondence, and republication of their own works—“a literary subgenre unto themselves.” Central to the family’s story is the question of Leopoldo’s commitment to fascism. Like others of his generation, he chose “survival over principles” in supporting Franco, “warts and all.” As a well-respected poet, he knew that Spain needed cultured men “to burnish the country’s reputation—and to defend it, a cause he assiduously took up.” He served as a censor, took a diplomatic post in London (where he befriended T.S. Eliot), directed a government-sponsored literary magazine, convened literary conferences, and became editorial director of the Spanish Reader’s Digest. If his political stance enraged the likes of Pablo Neruda, who attacked him as “a Francoist executioner,” in Spain his reputation flourished. A success professionally, his personal life was a mess. He was, Shulman reveals, “a cryptic, complicated, and often difficult man, and his personality and the power he wielded over his family left a profound mark on his wife and children.” Felicidad felt unloved and oppressed; his sons, beset by their own demons, failed to achieve the literary success to which they aspired. Spain’s roiling history, beginning in the 1930s, forms the backdrop to the family’s turmoil.
A richly detailed history chronicles a family’s pain.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-248419-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
