With remarkable grace and stunning bravery, Brodkey (The Runaway Soul, 1991, etc.) chronicles his own harrowing slide into illness and death. At first glance it seems an obvious—and cruel—irony that recording the ``passage into nonexistence'' should fall to a writer whose lifework was so vibrantly obsessed with chronicling the self. Yet it's difficult to imagine a writer better equipped to accomplish that grim task than Brodkey, whose restless intellect and elegant, precise language bestowed an almost physical beauty on the abstraction of human consciousness. From the time he was diagnosed with AIDS, while editing his novel Profane Friendship in the spring of 1993, until his death earlier this year, continuing to write—to convey order on formlessness—seems to have been not only an anodyne but a constant, sustaining desire for Brodkey. This book, portions of which appeared in the New Yorker, is many things: a journal that catalogs the daily indignities (the countless pills, the loss of strength and independence, the vagaries of public perception) attendant on AIDS; a memoir poignant with self-doubt and regret; a calm meditation on (and preparation for) death. For all his prickly combativeness and wounded vanity, Brodkey doesn't rage at the dying of the light. He saves his greatest bitterness and vituperation not for death, but for certain elements of New York life, especially for the city's ``literary empire-builders and . . . masters of fakery.'' Yet throughout his illness he remains devoted to the city, to his wife, Ellen Schwamm, whose ministrations and love are of immense importance and comfort to him, and ultimately to himself and his work. ``If I had to give up what I've written in order to be clear of this disease,'' he declares near the end, ``I wouldn't do it.'' Deeply affecting—a haunted, haunting work that penetrates with starling directness to the very core of the human mysteries: how to live, how to die. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4831-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dillard's headlong immersion into the mysteries of the natural world—from bedrocks to the heavens, and flora and fauna (from amoebas to us)—places this childhood memoir of life with a companionable family in Pittsburgh's elite enclave in the 50's and 60's. There is less tugging at the rare insight, the wild surmise, as in, say, Dillard's Teaching the Stone to Talk (1982), and this bright, imaginative whack through the "overgrown path" back to the past is more accessible to the general reader. Awareness is all to Dillard. To the tot, "mindless and eternal," playing on the kitchen floor, will come, in the roaring flood of time, "the breakthrough shift between seeing, and knowing you see." Aware as the dickens, Dillard found that everything in the world is "an outcrop of some vast vein of knowledge." The child Dillard will read books "to delirium," investigate rocks and insects, "pry open a landscape" with a microscope, draw faces, and just because it felt marvelous, pretend to fly, arms flapping, clown a Pittsburgh main street. In between accounts of such fabulous flights and efforts of concentration which "draw you down so very deep," there are delightful portraits of a set of attractive parents (shameless connoisseurs of jokes, both ancient and practical) and not unaffectionate views of Pittsburgh's Old Guard, at Country Club play to actually praying (to teen-ager Dillard's angry astonishment) in sables and tailcoats, in their gold-plated church). There are tales of mischief-making, dances and boys, school and the fine and splendid rages of adolescence ("I was a dog barking between my own ears"). Throughout, Dillard rumples up the placid life. An overview of one particular childhood told with shiver and bounce, and another Dillard voyage of discovery as she continues to "break up through the skin of awareness . . .as dolphins burst through the seas. . ."
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1987
ISBN: 0060915188
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.
The debut book from “one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard.”
In addition to delivering memorable portraits of undocumented immigrants residing precariously on Staten Island and in Miami, Cleveland, Flint, and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio, now enrolled in the American Studies doctorate program at Yale, shares her own Ecuadorian family story (she came to the U.S. at age 5) and her anger at the exploitation of hardworking immigrants in the U.S. Because the author fully comprehends the perils of undocumented immigrants speaking to journalist, she wisely built trust slowly with her subjects. Her own undocumented status helped the cause, as did her Spanish fluency. Still, she protects those who talked to her by changing their names and other personal information. Consequently, readers must trust implicitly that the author doesn’t invent or embellish. But as she notes, “this book is not a traditional nonfiction book….I took notes by hand during interviews and after the book was finished, I destroyed those notes.” Recounting her travels to the sites where undocumented women, men, and children struggle to live above the poverty line, she reports her findings in compelling, often heart-wrenching vignettes. Cornejo Villavicencio clearly shows how employers often cheat day laborers out of hard-earned wages, and policymakers and law enforcement agents exist primarily to harm rather than assist immigrants who look and speak differently. Often, cruelty arrives not only in economic terms, but also via verbal slurs and even violence. Throughout the narrative, the author explores her own psychological struggles, including her relationships with her parents, who are considered “illegal” in the nation where they have worked hard and tried to become model residents. In some of the most deeply revealing passages, Cornejo Villavicencio chronicles her struggles reconciling her desire to help undocumented children with the knowledge that she does not want "kids of my own." Ultimately, the author’s candor about herself removes worries about the credibility of her stories.
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-59268-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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