Portraits of various postWW II Paris-based writers capture the idiosyncratic personalities of literary notables but fail to cohere into a panorama. Campbell, who has written a biography of James Baldwin (Talking at the Gates, 1991), eagerly introduces his readers to a large group of American, French, and British authors. He opens with Richard Wright, expatriated just after the war, and his 1946 encounter with Gertrude Stein, then moves into a discussion of the important intellectual exchanges between Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre. Wright's presence drew Baldwin to Paris; the two soon had a falling out, however, which Campbell details sensitively. The author meanwhile develops another narrative, beginning with his fellow Scot Alexander Trocchi and the literary journal Merlin. Campbell describes the crucial role that Trocchi and his confederates played in the dissemination of Samuel Beckett's work and their eventual alliance with the notorious literary pornographer Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press. (Beckett himself is only a shadowy presence here.) How does Campbell connect Wright, Baldwin, and their associates, on the one hand, with Trocchi, Girodias, and their publishing ventures on the other? The short answer is, he doesn't. Campbell explores the figure of the Negro delineated by African-American expatriates, as well as the derivative phenomenon of the ``white Negro''—making a strong case for French existentialist Boris Vian as its prototype, while also treating its celebration by the early Beats. He sketches the atmosphere of Cold War persecution and paranoia that gradually destroyed Wright and his cohorts, while also causing troubles for Olympia, with its porn-heavy list, but these parallels remain underdeveloped. Nevertheless, Campbell's effort has value as a series of miniatures that brings together such strangely similar contemporaneous artifacts as the novels of Chester Himes and The Story of O. Campbell is onto something—perhaps a third try with this material is in order.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-689-12172-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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