There are only occasional insights in this frenzied, unabashedly self-indulgent book.
Recounting a literary obsession.
When Hallman (Wm & H’ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between William and Henry James, 2013, etc.) first proposed writing a book about Nicholson Baker, emulating Baker’s book about John Updike, U and I, Hallman’s agent was discouraging about its “possible commercial value.” So Hallman fired him and found a new agent who sold the proposal, setting him on a quest to indulge in his passion. Baker writes lustily about sex, giving Hallman a chance to do so, as well, which seems to be his real aim. He ruminates about masturbating, offers clinical details of his lovemaking, describes fondling his girlfriend’s breasts, and excitedly shares information about the frequency and quality of her orgasms, which, he notes, “had become more and more intense, had grown by orders of magnitude, and now, seismically speaking, they were eruptive, volcanic orgasms…of roof joist-shattering intensity.” Other bodily functions (urinating, defecating) and parts (penises, anuses) also merit the author’s consideration. Readers unfamiliar with Baker’s writing may have a difficult time engaging in Hallman’s fixation, his quandary about how to proceed (should he meet him?) and his detailed analysis of his works. Reading Baker, he discovered, “seemed like the perfect tool to use to poke a hole in the dike of my imagination” (phallic imagery abounds throughout), and writing about him was even more inspiring. He felt “a renewed sense of purpose” and saw Baker as his “savior.” When the two finally met, Hallman realized that he was never going to be “a simple friend” to the man he had made his literary subject. “Nicholson Baker need not be a savior for anyone other than me,” Hallman remarks, though he urges readers “to find their Nicholson Baker,” a writer who liberates their imaginations and enriches their worlds.
There are only occasional insights in this frenzied, unabashedly self-indulgent book.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1451682007
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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