A penetrating analysis of the displacement and internal divisions created by linguistic adaptation, but undermined by a...
An often sophisticated, more frequently discursive memoir on transnational and translingual migration from Mexican-born critic and scholar Stavans (Latino U.S.A., 2000, etc.).
A product of the Jewish Diaspora (his grandmother emigrated from Poland in the early 1930s), Stavans grew up in the 1960s and ’70s amid a family that found artistic release in language. His father, one of the first Jewish actors in Mexico, became a soap-opera star. His brother Darian, a stutterer who experienced mental illness, overcame his difficulties enough to become a singer and musician. But Stavans’s Yiddish-speaking community, fearful of anti-Semitic outbreaks incited by the corrupt national regime, left him with a “feeling of marginality.” His restless utopian yearnings took him to Spain, Israel, and finally the US. Adding Spanish, Hebrew, and English to his linguistic skills provided him with a host of literary models to whom he pays eloquent tribute, including Kafka, Borges, Conrad, Nabokov, Richard Rodriguez, and especially Irving Howe. Most important, literature provided this self-described chameleon a means to forming his own identity and creating his own internal homeland. (Even his Whitmanesque ode to encountering New York for the first time evokes literature, as he compares the city to “a huge book, a novel-in-progress perhaps, filled with anecdotes, with a multilingual poetry impossible to repress.”) His meditations on the paradoxes of language are incisive (“Curiously, in the United States, to be a member of the upper class and a polyglot is a ticket to success. But multilingualism among the poor is unacceptable and, thus, immediately condemned”), and he uses his considerable erudition sparingly, always to illustrate points rather than merely to dazzle. Unfortunately, Stavans has not integrated the story of his family into the narrative enough to create a compelling story arc. Moreover, and perhaps more fatally for an intellectual memoir, his reflections are not focused or energized by either major figures he has known nor by an opposing ideology that can rouse him to combat.
A penetrating analysis of the displacement and internal divisions created by linguistic adaptation, but undermined by a rickety narrative structure.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-87763-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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