A fine introduction to a writer who deserves to be better known to English-language readers.
Proust meets magical realism in this searching, lyrical memoir by the Mexican poet and conservationist.
“I am still alive in a fresh wound,” wrote fellow poet Octavio Paz. Aridjis (An Angel Speaks: Selected Poems, 2015, etc.) counts his own birth as a poet in a wound suffered when he was 10 years old, when a shotgun he was aiming at passing birds misfired: “Invaded by ammunition, engulfed in the smell of gunpowder, my blood hot and my right hand bleeding," he writes, "I wasn’t aware of my state until I tried to take a step and a feeling of being torn apart kept me from moving.” In this soft-spoken account, the accident transforms Aridjis from boisterous lad to a bookish solitary who turns to poetry. It would not be a modernist Latin American literary work without at least a moment reminiscent of García Márquez, and there are many here, as when a suitor rejected by his aunt takes up the habit of sitting in the town square holding a protective umbrella, “though the sky was clear.” Aridjis’ mother is central to the story, from the moment of birth through his traumatized childhood, and she could not have asked for a more affectionate portrait: “To remember her was to have her always in my own past, in the memory of my being, united, inseparably, to my self.” We also see the growing importance of the natural world in the author’s life and work: the sight of a drop of water sliding off a leaf is enough to distinguish the wounded boy from ordinary people. “I was moved by things that did not interest them,” he recalls. Readers wish only that Aridjis revealed more of his process of writing, for the passages of poetry among the prose are lovely incantations: “I / made my poem / and I recited it trembling.”
A fine introduction to a writer who deserves to be better known to English-language readers.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-914671-40-4
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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