Still, a gracefully executed hall of mirrors.
A Scottish ghostwriter materializes with a florid, aphoristic, generous account of her nearly 15-year association with Quartet Books in England.
Erdal’s poignant and even-spirited memoir tells of the “finely balanced symbiosis” she achieved from 1981, when she first met the wealthy Lebanese Naim Attallah—whom she calls Tiger—to 1998, when their marriage-like partnership finally dissolved. Originally from Fife, Erdal, a mother with two children, traveled to London to meet Tiger for work on Russian translations, an undertaking that led to their first publishing coup, Red Square. Tiger was a “bird of paradise” with the finest, rarest furnishings and clothes (“Go on, touch!” he cries. “I have only the best”) who employed a bevy of aristocratic young women in his London office. He went to any length to satisfy his considerable vanity (his style was “a lethal combination of charm and chutzpah”), and Erdal became his amanuensis. She ghostwrote everything from Tiger’s love letters to his 1,200-page Asking Questions (a series of interviews with famous women), two later novels, and a newspaper column. Her double life suited her, since she was able to carry out her duties from home in Scotland—except when her marriage broke up. Her descriptions are rich and gently humorous, especially the details about her childhood in Fife and about working holidays writing Tiger’s novels at his Dordogne country house, where she witnessed the grisly ritual of raw meat being fed to his beloved, murderous Doberman guard dogs. The nuts and bolts of the publishing enterprise are the least interesting; the extended extracts from the writers’ collaborated sex scenes are also fairly tedious. Erdal’s revelations about her Napoleonic boss refrain from nastiness, yet her coyness in refusing to name names (still!) even her new husband’s name—seems like a childish disguise. Indeed, the reader has to wonder what possessed this intelligent, gifted writer to collude in her selflessness all those years.
Still, a gracefully executed hall of mirrors.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51426-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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