A revelatory meditation on reading, writing, and editing.
A celebration of a favorite writer deepens into an unexpectedly complex and ambivalent response.
Evenson (Critical Studies/CalArts; The Warren, 2016, etc.) first read Carver’s classic collection of minimalist fiction when he was an 18-year-old student intent on learning to write fiction himself. He wasn’t well-versed in Carver’s contemporaries, so he came to him from an unorthodox direction: “I had Beckett and Kafka as models for what I hoped literature could do,” he writes. “Which probably made me see Carver in a very eccentric light.” Adding to the eccentricity of the experience was the fact that Evenson was a Mormon and therefore abstained from alcohol, which fueled almost all of these stories and was such a struggle for Carver. Yet Evenson’s close readings proved profoundly influential, as he felt that Carver’s stories had “a productive ambiguity that stimulates a creative energy that keeps them active and alive in a way that books more insistent on ‘meaning something’ don’t manage.” Seeing Carver’s seminal fiction through Evenson’s eyes will bring readers back to the work fresh. Then things get trickier. Like the rest of the literary world, Evenson discovered just how aggressively editor Gordon Lish had refocused these stories, in some cases cutting as much as 80 percent from Carver’s original manuscript. As Carver moved away from the severity of such minimalism and published more detailed versions of some of these stories, Evenson thought that the new versions “felt less like the Carver I knew and more like stories that didn’t have his distinctive imprint.” Further complicating the issue is the fact that Evenson would subsequently have some ambivalent experiences with Lish as his editor and some stonewalling from the Carver estate while researching a piece on the Lish-Carver relationship. The author leaves no question that he remains grateful for the stories as he first encountered them and prefers them to the versions Carver favored, yet he identifies with how the author felt like an “imposter.”
A revelatory meditation on reading, writing, and editing.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63246-061-5
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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