A luminous meditation on the past, the enigmas of family and the tangled mystery of love.
An elegant memoir about the author’s turbulent relationship with his erratic, irascible, alcoholic and otherwise maddening artist-mother—who could sometimes be nurturing, even smothering.
Novelist Antrim (The Verificationist, 2000, etc.) begins and ends with allusions to his mother’s death from lung cancer in 2000; along the way, Antrim reminds us of her illness and of his own responses to it, including a bizarre obsession with buying a new bed after his mother died. He could not settle on a brand or style, he harassed mattress mavens, he imagined that his mother was somehow inside the bed, reaching out to him. Antrim also chronicles the weird behavior of Mom’s laconic boyfriend, who believed he’d found a lost painting by Leonardo (he hadn’t) and a harrowing encounter with eccentric, drunken Uncle Eldridge, who seemed on the verge of raping the author, a teen at the time. He includes revealing stories as well about his father—twice married to his mother—some grandparents, some girlfriends and his own emergence as a reader. (As a boy, he favored Tolkien, Wells and Conan Doyle.) He describes a moment of sexual awakening at age 12, when he lay naked all night with an 11-year-old girl who was a family friend, and he paints a dazzling portrait of a white kimono his mother designed, a garment whose metaphorical significance Antrim explores at length. At the heart of all lies the mother, a woman who mystifies and enrages the author even as she approaches death.
A luminous meditation on the past, the enigmas of family and the tangled mystery of love.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-29961-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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