A captivating chronicle and homage.
The renowned biographer, novelist, and poet recounts his transformative youthful journey with a famed literary master.
In 1971, when he was a graduate student at St. Andrews University in Scotland, Parini took two short journeys—here combined into one weeklong trip in order to maintain “narrative efficiency”—in the company of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who was visiting one of Parini’s mentors. At the time, Parini had not read anything Borges had written, and he was surprised that his friends not only knew of the Argentine writer, but held him in the highest esteem. At first, Parini saw Borges only as a garrulous, “difficult and self-involved” old man, given to nostalgic memories of a lost love and disquisitions on an astonishing range of literature. He needed constant attention due to his blindness and constant acquiescence to his impetuous needs. Still, Parini agreed to squire Borges around the Scottish Highlands, serving as his guide, aide, and, especially, his eyes. Parini delivers vibrant descriptions of clouds and rain, earth and sun: “the bright lakes, the fertile land with stone barns and hillsides smudged with white-and-gray sheep,” the oaks with crooked limbs, and the dark waters of Loch Ness, in which their rowboat capsized. Parini decided that one should never take a “childlike, irascible, and unpredictable” old blind man in a rowboat. But by the end of their travels together, Parini realized that Borges was extraordinary: a man who glowed with “an enigmatic brilliance. One felt somehow more intelligent, more learned and witty, in his presence. The universe itself felt more pliable and yielding, and so available.” Parini’s vividly detailed memoir, replete with verbatim conversations, is the result of much shaping and retelling, first in fragments over the years, later as a novel, and then as “a kind of novelistic memoir,” which, Parini writes, “survives in its transformation into this text.”
A captivating chronicle and homage.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54582-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
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