Deft and stylish.
A Swedish writer and poet well known in her native land makes her U.S. debut with a serenely ironic memoir about life in a small Breton town.
In 2000, 55-year-old Malmsten took her Swedish pension and headed south from central Norrland on the trans-European motorway to find a new life. She carried little with her except a love of history and a sense of social justice, qualities evident throughout these delightfully meandering reflections. Somewhere near Brest, in France, Malmsten discovered a parcel of paradise “where the land comes to an end in Europe—fin des terres, finis terrae—Finistère” and proceeded to dig in. She gradually fashioned an elaborate garden (despite the high price of water) with the help of gardening books in several languages, plans she drew up herself and well-meaning neighbors eager to dispense advice. One important daily visitor was the exquisitely elegant widow Madame C, who gently corrected the author’s French-in-progress and first planted the idea of writing a book about Finistère. The author reflects here on the advantages and disadvantages of being a stranger. She describes the Swedish welfare state and a maddening confrontation with the Social Insurance Office (dubbed by its victims “the Social Insulting Office”) that led to her emigration. She portrays the family members who have shaped her character: Grandma, who had large hands and a beautiful peony garden, and Malmsten’s privileged father, who joined the international socialist organization Clarté in the 1930s. The author shared his principles enough to abruptly break with Monsieur Le R, a fellow gardener and admirer, when he revealed a racist nature. Yet in her text she expresses both admiration and revulsion for Sultan Mehmet of Istanbul, a brutal dictator but a gorgeous gardener. No matter how serious her reflections, Malmsten always delivers them with a light touch, and she’s perfectly willing to laugh at herself, especially when recounting hilarious faux pas in her adopted language.
Deft and stylish.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-84343-164-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvill UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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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