A forthright and sensitive tale of a daughter’s quest.
A young woman crosses a cultural divide in search of her past.
In her debut memoir, Fajardo (The Dish on Food and Farming in Colonial America, 2017, etc.) recounts her emotional journey, at age 21, to find the father she had not seen since she was a young child. Born in Colombia, the author grew up in Minnesota; her American mother told her that her father, Renzo, loved his native country so much that he did not want to leave. The truth, Fajardo learned, was much more complicated, as were her feelings for the stranger with gray-flecked black hair and mustache, smelling of cigarette smoke and soap, who greeted her, accompanied by his young wife, when she landed in Colombia. Their reunion was awkward despite each being able to speak the other’s language. Fajardo wanted not only to know Renzo, but to understand why her mother could not live with him—in short, “the complicated truth of these two people who brought me into the world, the events that had aligned to create the life I was living.” She discovered more than her parents’ apparent incompatibility. Her father was “overly emotional and fiercely closed off,” she writes, “and my mother reacts to everyone’s mood, switching back and forth between bliss and despair.” Her mother felt alienated and isolated in Colombia, and Renzo felt the same when they returned to Minneapolis. Those differences proved unbridgeable, but there were other problems, as well, including her father’s infidelity and, for the author, a shocking revelation. Fajardo strains to make connections between the events of her life and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. When it was published in the 1960s, she writes, “magical realism was part of the landscape, not a literary genre.” However, this story, marked by disillusion, yearning, sadness, and one happy coincidence, does not draw upon or evoke magical realism; nor does Fajardo need García Márquez to justify or bolster her memoir.
A forthright and sensitive tale of a daughter’s quest.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5179-0686-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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