Chandler wrote not about crime or detection, as George V. Higgins observed, but about the corruption of the human spirit....
Day (The Letters of Noel Coward, 2007, etc.) lets peerless mystery writer Raymond Chandler reveal himself through his own words—and in those of his fictional creation Philip Marlowe—while contributing structure, comment and a useful amount of connective tissue.
For someone so associated with the American patois, it is ironic that Chandler generally thought of himself as a classically educated “Englishman” imbued with British tastes. Day demonstrates how the Chicago-born author, a resident of England for much of his youth, had to “learn American just like a foreign language,” both customs and vernacular. Chandler was taken with the pungency of American English, admiring how it “roughed up” and enlivened the language, as Shakespeare had done. Day then shows how character, language and style superseded plot in Chandler's fiction, unlike such shallow avatars of construction as Agatha Christie. Though a man of comparatively modest literary output, Chandler mused extensively on writing in letters to colleagues and friends. Day connects Chandler's signature ideas and impulses most effectively in this correspondence. While he disclaims biographical intent, such elements abound in the book. Chandler was repatriated to Los Angeles in 1912, and the city would become as much a character in his novels as Marlowe, his alter ego. Foremost, Chandler was a sultan of similes. Delightful as they often are, however, Day drowns us in a deluge of them. Like Chandler, Day also betrays a faint whiff of condescension toward American culture—not without some justification—but he is wholly sympathetic in charting Chandler's long, happy marriage to a woman 18 years his senior, his devastation over her death and his accelerated alcoholism.
Chandler wrote not about crime or detection, as George V. Higgins observed, but about the corruption of the human spirit. Day deepens our understanding of how Chandler, who cared for his legacy, balanced commitment to principle with living and prospering in the real world.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35236-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
PERSPECTIVES
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