Fans of Bennett know what to expect—bracingly good prose, a well-seeded laugh here and there and much food for thought.
A relentlessly self-aware memoir by Bennett (The Uncommon Reader, 2007, etc.), that most inward-searching of dramatists and autobiographers.
The English have a fine confessional tradition, but when writing about family, the potential for embarrassment seems to silence, or at least gentle, many a brave voice. (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” Philip Larkin famously wrote, and while England was shocked, no one rushed to correct him.) Not so Bennett, who writes affectingly and fearlessly of his mother’s long, slow descent into dementia. Mam had had barmy days before, he writes, but that changed to depression. Eventually the depression began taking more severe turns, which had the effect of uniting the siblings in concern over her condition—“but when no immediate recovery was forthcoming we would take ourselves off again while Dad was left to cope. Or to care, as the phrase is nowadays.” But Mam’s spells inspire a quest, as the author examines his family’s past to understand his parents, and himself. Thus it is that he discovers Grandad, “bald as an egg,” who had suffered through an explosion in a gasworks that blew off all his hair. Bennett also remembers an eccentric aunt, determined and steely, “recounting the events of her day in Proustian detail,” a great lesson for a budding storyteller in how not to attempt to bewitch an audience. Then there’s his parents’ own discovery, well into adulthood, of alcohol, and not just the booze but the snacks to accompany it, “cocktail snacks, bits of cheese and pineapple, sausages-on-sticks, food that nowadays would come under the generic term of nibbles.” Unfortunately for Bennett, Dad passed on, Mam remembered nothing, and it was up to the author to be the conscience and memory of his little tribe—a duty he discharges forthrightly and elegantly.
Fans of Bennett know what to expect—bracingly good prose, a well-seeded laugh here and there and much food for thought.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-19192-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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