An impossible mess of memory and desire.
A collection of essays in which Morrison probes the beginnings of his gay self-identity—a process undoubtedly more intriguing for him than it is for us.
The author treads familiar ground in queer autobiography: childhood longings and confusions are trotted out like trick ponies as he advances from naïveté to knowledge. Violin lessons with a class of girls, the spiritual exigencies of Catholicism, the frustrations of family vacations, and a youthful crush on teen idol David Cassidy—these times and trials of youth serve as the basis of Morrison’s retrospective analysis of the intersection between sexuality and identity in his childhood. Even the tried-and-true twin locations of queer adolescent angst and opportunity—gym and drama class—make their obligatory appearance. The tales themselves offer the promised insight into Morrison’s queer apotheosis, but his floundering and fluctuating tone inhibits the graceful flow of the narrative. At different points in the narrative his voice mimics a sociologist (“In American suburbia, the acquisition of the family pet consolidates the family itself by way of the very processes of acquisition”), the heroine of a Harlequin romance (“ ‘Oh, Cadmus,’ I cry, ‘did you think I would forget you? How could I ever forget my own dear, sweet Cadmus?’ ”), and a New Age guru (“The boy dreams. In the dream he is alone”). Such jerky and stilted tones destroy the quiet accumulation of childhood memories that might have created a handsome patchwork of gay longings and musings. Any hope that such a delightfully queer amalgamation may arise, however, dashes to pieces at such moments of irrelevance as (to take just one example) the author’s extended reflections on President Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal. With more scenes of boyhood wrestling and less pontificating, Morrison’s story might have found its way. But that was not to be.
An impossible mess of memory and desire.Pub Date: March 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26129-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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