As sere and scoured as its locale, hard-fought and cleansing for author and reader alike, making for a companionable...
A searching spirit infests a memoir of a month spent way, way down yonder, on Amsterdam Island in the south Indian Ocean, giving the author some extreme downtime to ponder life’s strangeness.
“The island was remote to the point of being inaccessible; it was barely inhabited, although supplied with meat and wine; it was small enough to be taken in at a glance, but not without a variety of features,” Dutch journalist van Cleef writes. Just the place for a guy at existential loose ends with no family, no girlfriend, no job—nothing but an urge to get to the edge and look over. Getting there would prove vexing: a good fifth of the narrative details van Cleef’s assault on the French political hierarchy to gain access to Amsterdam Island. About this piece of absurdist theater worthy of Ionesco, he writes, “the project had degenerated into a series of letters written in reference to other letters, into a self-perpetuating cycle of occasionally promising, but never definite, developments.” Once the green light is given, the island proves to be his kind of place. Approaching its gray shores “was like watching a black-and-white movie on a channel with poor reception”; closer proximity brought the stink of fur seals and the buzz of flies. The site’s tranquility was wreathed in a state of permanent decay. Van Cleef shares his time on the island with a small band of volcanologists, ornithologists, students of lichen and wind, a detail of soldiers to protect the outpost, and a company of carpenters, glaziers, and other hired hands who fix the weather tower, make the water drinkable, or coddle the video machine. Unlike those taking geomagnetic and seismological measurements, van Cleef treasures his geographical, cultural, and psychic distance from it all.
As sere and scoured as its locale, hard-fought and cleansing for author and reader alike, making for a companionable excursion into forlornness. (3 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7225-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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