Ultimately, the memoir reveals more about how it felt to be the son of such a father than it does about the novelist.
There is love within this memoir by the son of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist, but there is even greater distance.
A Freudian psychotherapist and academic, the author generally resists the temptation to analyze his famous father in the manner of a psychobiography. But neither does he add much revelation to what readers already knew or suspected, mainly that the writer who was arguably the greatest novelist of his generation could be difficult and selfish as a family man. He also used his failed marriages as grist for the mill of many of his greatest novels, with the son (who read those novels in succession before writing this memoir) showing where he thinks the voice and experience of the fictional narrators were very much the novelist’s. As the only child of Bellow’s first marriage, the author admits that “Saul’s departure split my life in two,” and that the divide deepened as the battles intensified between his parents (largely over money during the course and aftermath of the divorce). As someone who remained true to the leftist politics that his father famously repudiated (and from which his mother never wavered), he makes a distinction between the “young Saul” with whom he identified and the increasingly conservative, repressive, death-obsessed man his father became. The culture wars from the 1960s onward found father and son on opposite sides, while personal affronts (an ailing Saul’s failure to attend his granddaughter’s wedding, the antipathy between his final wife and widow and his sons) deepened the gulf. The author writes from what he says is a need “for a portrait that reveals Saul’s complex nature, one written by a loving son who also knew his shortcomings.”
Ultimately, the memoir reveals more about how it felt to be the son of such a father than it does about the novelist.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-995-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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