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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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