Antarctica is not so much a destination as a symptom in this intense, disturbing memoir of a wickedly unpleasant childhood. Novelist Diski (Monkey’s Uncle, 1995 etc.) doesn’t like to travel, doesn’t like breaks in routine—“indolence has always been my most essential quality”—but an undeniable urge to visit Antarctica swept her along. What draws her is the land’s white oblivion, the solitude and stillness, where little distracts the eye from the emptiness. There is safety in that blank reality and its unbroken whiteness, the same safety Diski found in the white hospital sheets that swaddled her during an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital, where a bout of bone-cracking depression sent her. As she makes her tetchy way south, she reveals a dismal childhood with wretched parents, episodes of abandonment and running away and attempted suicide. It’s hard to imagine a more miserable experience and easy to understand why Diski never saw her mother again after she was 19 years old. Now Diski’s daughter wants to discover her grandmother’s fate, which sends Diski pawing through the ashes—and sailing to Antarctica. Her observations of her shipmates and the landscape are by turns droll, acidic, and closely detailed, the writing is spare, her intelligence bright and quirky. She visits outposts that are pearls of desolation, marvels at the ghostly passing of icebergs, and, always the resistant traveler, even considers not going ashore when the boat reaches its goal: “It’s not the arriving but the not-arriving . . . it’s not the seeing of the whales, but the possibility of choosing not to see them.” Been there, haven’t done that. “I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is colored white and filled with a singing silence.” Diski’s Antarctica-of-the-mind is such a place.
Pub Date: Aug. 27, 1998
ISBN: 0-88001-603-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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