In sharing the experience of solitude and reflection, Sjöberg invites readers to see through his eyes, in language that is...
A literary memoir by the Swedish author, a man who lives on an island and collects flies, reflecting on the significance of his obsession.
Both an entomologist and a literary critic, Sjöberg blurs the border between these two vocations while exploring plenty of other territory as well. “Here and there, my story is about something else,” he admits. “Exactly what, I don’t know.” Readers will share his uncertainty, as he proceeds like one of his beloved hoverflies, flitting from his experiences on an island east of Stockholm to his meditations on time, concentration, and the language of geography to his literary appreciations of D.H. Lawrence, Milan Kundera, and Bruce Chatwin to his investigations into the life of an obscure naturalist–turned–art collector. The author recognizes that devoting his life to flies might not have the romantic resonance with readers that butterflies would, but he finds himself within a realm where “everything flies, absolutely everything,” a world that can be read as “a thousand commentaries. An entire apparatus of footnotes.” Most of the book takes place within the mind of the author—the connections he makes and the implications he finds—though sometimes he ventures out to provide naturalistic detail of his life on the island or historical inquiry into the lives of entomologists with whom he seems to be having more of a conversation than with any of his living contemporaries. In a rare encounter with another human, who asks what he is doing and why, he reflects, “It is at such moments that the entomologist becomes a story-teller. He is prepared to do almost anything to get someone to listen and perhaps understand. He is prepared to use any ruse or artifice to avoid being the only one who sees.”
In sharing the experience of solitude and reflection, Sjöberg invites readers to see through his eyes, in language that is often poetic, sometimes inscrutable.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87015-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
