A wise, astute, and luminous literary commonplace book.
Self-portrait of a prizewinning poet in search of himself in entrancing Paris.
“In part, I come to Paris because I am a dreamer. It is a place where I am able to escape the shadows,” writes Cole (Literature/Claremont McKenna Coll.; Nothing to Declare: Poems, 2015, etc.) in this delicate, affectionate, and reflective memoir. Originally serialized in the New Yorker, the book’s 17 parts are mini-essays exploring the Paris landscape, family, friends, films, being gay, and the art of poetry. One of the many questions the author poses throughout the book is, “why am I writing all this down, dear reader?” He answers, “I don’t want to conceal anything, or be surreptitious. Instead, I want to reveal something…that might otherwise remain dormant behind the intense beauty of Paris.” Cole visited a number of graves, including Baudelaire’s and his very good friend James Lord’s. While visiting Susan Sontag’s in Montparnasse, Cole describes himself as a “literary tourist….Cemeteries, after all, are for the living.” Stylistically, the book has a strong aphoristic feel to it. The text, a “landscape self-portrait,” is quietly understated in its reflections. Not surprisingly, at the heart of the book is poetry, Cole’s own and that of others, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens. I want my poems to seem rebellious…definite, self-sufficient,” he writes, “and true in what they represent, like expressionist paintings.” When “so much American poetry feels emotionally tepid and almost suburban,” Cole revels in the “organized violence” of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, which “extended the boundaries of the lyric.” For Cole, Paris is the “city of the beloved. Some say a man goes mad if he is without love.” The book’s ending, with its series of sentences all beginning with “J’aime,” is exuberant, Whitmanesque, Orphic: “and in this place, I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew.”
A wise, astute, and luminous literary commonplace book.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-218-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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