A literary life of major importance, authoritatively told in an exceptionally fine biography.
An eminent Oxford scholar offers a trenchant analysis of the ethnic, historical-political, and cultural matrices that produced the late (1899–1986) Argentinean literary magus.
Borges was born into a liberal Buenos Aires family with a history (sometimes retrospectively exaggerated) of active involvement in the liberation of its country from Spain and its city's economic and cultural development. Williamson places understandable emphasis on Borges's unbreakable lifelong attachments to his “spirited, highly intelligent” mother and his morose father, a prominent physician and failed writer. Deftly connecting the son's later poems and stories with the events and stages of his early life, Williamson constructs a vividly convincing picture of a bookish, sickly boy who in effect grew up in a library, developed a personal aesthetic based largely on his introduction to modernist literary movements during his family's European travels, and rose gradually to prominence among the Argentinean avant-garde. Several failed relationships with women inspired a Dantean search for love and wholeness, and the incipient blindness that would eventually overtake him narrowed his artistic horizons—even as his conflicted stances vis-à-vis his country's political revolutions doubtless influenced his rejection of attempts to contain reality within formal literary structures (e.g., the novel) and his embrace of irony, relativism, “verbal artifice,” and the liberating energies inherent in myths and legends. Williamson expertly summarizes the years of Borges's international fame, earned by his landmark 1944 volume Ficciones and its similarly distinguished successors, and movingly evokes the image of an aging literary lion out of touch with the failed regimes that followed Juan Perón's disastrous tenures, incessantly traveling to lecture abroad and collect awards and honorary degrees, finding muted happiness at last with the much younger Maria Kodama, the “literary secretary” who became the consolation of his old age, and—at last—his Beatrice.
A literary life of major importance, authoritatively told in an exceptionally fine biography.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-88579-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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