Coherence is a contrivance of any life story, Chase implies in his candid and insightful memoir; some truths may be shared...
Fragments come together to reveal a life.
Novelist and memoirist Chase (Winkie, 2006, etc.), who chronicled his brother’s death from AIDS in The Hurry-Up Song (1995), constructs this book—partly a documentary of his life, partly a meditation on living—in the form of “aphorism-like statements” which, “when added one to another, might accrue to make some larger statement that will placate despair.” The passages, most not longer than a sentence or two, contain random observations; journal entries; remembered dreams; overheard remarks; and bits of conversations with Chase’s partner, therapist, parents, co-workers and friends. He records losing his baby teeth, rewarded by a dime from the tooth fairy—a rare happy memory of his boyhood. His parents’ contentious marriage, he writes, resulted in his “crippling inner turmoil as an adult.” Emotional turmoil has been fueled, too, by his struggle to admit his homosexuality, “The odd nature of the closet, the open secret, not only to others but to oneself.” Lost “in the forest” of his feelings, he engaged in an affair with an emotionally fragile woman. “But this isn’t merely a story of sexual confusion,” he admits, “rather of self-doubt, which is bigger.” He doubts, above all, his ability to love and to be loved: “As the reader may have noticed, I like to mingle love with panic, self-doubt, and conjecture.” Chase writes movingly of his parents’ serious health problems and deaths and his brother’s tragic last years. He recounts travels to Rome and Egypt with his partner and reflects on the emotional impact of 9/11. Ellipses are as forceful as words: “[L]et the white space between these sentences stand for what couldn’t be seen then; or what can’t be remembered now….”
Coherence is a contrivance of any life story, Chase implies in his candid and insightful memoir; some truths may be shared in words, others hidden between the lines.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0695-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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