A talented writer wrestles with demons, endeavoring to define and thus restrain—if not defeat—them.
From novelist Plante (The Age of Terror, 1999, etc.), an often-lyrical memoir of religion lost, sexual identity discovered, vocation found, and near-madness born of obsession.
This time out, Plante crafts a coming-of-age story that’s often surprising and illuminating, but sometimes conventional and even a tad dull. The author, who has Blackfoot ancestors, begins when he’s seven and afraid of the ghost of an Indian he imagines seeing in the neighborhood woods, and he ends with accounts of a close friend, novelist Mary Gordon, attempting to help him rediscover his Catholicism, and of his journeys to France in search of the burial records of some 17th-century Plantes. The boyhood portions are striking, none more so than the memory of a nun at school who appears to have an attraction for the young student. Helping him dress for a school play, she lightly touches the nape of his neck: “My body began to shake.” His body shakes later on, too, especially when, during a college year abroad, he hooks up with his first gay sex partner, a strange man named Öçi. The pair travel around Europe together, and much later Öçi dies of what seems to be AIDS. Plante eventually finds his permanent partner, a young Greek named Nikos, and then discovers that he is flirting with insanity as he tries to understand the images that haunt him. For a time, he records them in a journal at night, one image per page; after two years, he has 650 pages. What do they mean? Why do they keep him awake? Why does he write so obsessively that even Nikos has trouble getting his attention? Like several other memoirists, Plante assumes that substantial passages from his journals or commonplace books are interesting when often they aren’t. The final short passage, a French prayer once overheard, suggests that he has achieved a sort of epiphanic peace.
A talented writer wrestles with demons, endeavoring to define and thus restrain—if not defeat—them.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-7264-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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