A complex portrait of the nature and power of narrative.
An author and illustrator meditates on the need to remember the past in order to understand the present.
As a 10-year-old growing up on the banks of the Seine in the 1960s, Pajak “dreamt of a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea.” But, as he puts it, “my book died every day.” Years later, he found his theme: “The evocation of erased History and of the war of time,” by which he means “the war waged by a present stripped of its past, crumbled into an improbable future, be it radiant or disenchanted.” Most pages display Pajak’s black-and-white drawings followed by short paragraphs. The author writes of the many artists and writers who grappled with the 20th century’s most significant questions, most notably the fascism and anti-Semitism embodied not only in figures like Hitler and Mussolini, but also in a pair of Pajak’s boarding school classmates, one of whom performed the Nazi salute when teachers left the room and “was always fulminating against the Jews.” Among the figures Pajak cites are Samuel Beckett, artist Bram van Velde, and Walter Benjamin, especially Benjamin’s time in Spain before the Spanish Civil War and his belief that “the supposed universality of History lacked the mute voice of the oppressed.” If some drawing-prose combinations are too on-the-nose—a picture of a fort as the author notes that Benjamin likened Andre Gidé’s thoughts to a fort—others offer witty contrasts, as when he pairs childhood memories of the smell of his grandmother’s flat with a drawing of himself smoking as a young boy. Some of the combinations are chilling: A drawing of an emaciated man in a concentration camp appears on the same page on which Pajak cites Benjamin’s awareness of the rise of anti-Semitism among French intellectuals.
A complex portrait of the nature and power of narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-286-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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