Readers of this troubling account will be eager to rediscover The Upstairs Room.
The Dutch American author of the young-adult Holocaust novel The Upstairs Room (1972) recounts the unexpected, devastating suicide of her husband.
Before she wrote her Newbery Honor–winning book based on her real-life story, Reiss resolved, at the urging of her American husband, to return to Holland and face her memories of that painful time. In the summer of 1969, she traveled to Holland, accompanied by her two school-age daughters. Intending to stay seven weeks, she alternately visited her sisters, Sini and Rachel, and the Oostervelds, who sheltered Sini and the author for two-and-a-half years in their house in Usselo. Jim, Reiss’s American husband of nearly 11 years, joined the family as planned after two weeks, and together they criss-crossed Holland. But Jim—a well-educated, non-practicing Jew from Philadelphia who worked at a retail firm in New York City, where the Reisses lived—seemed distracted and distressed, and his wife sensed “something was off.” After returning home alone, he killed himself in their apartment off Second Avenue. The author, shocked and angry at what seemed to her a betrayal, rushed back to arrange a funeral. Reiss’s re-creation of this wrenching period is somewhat scattershot, no doubt reflecting her emotional turmoil. There are moments of strenuous clarity, such as when she and Jim returned together to the hiding room upstairs in the Oostervelds’ home, and each sank into a personal grief. Reiss longed for him to hold her, “to extinguish other people’s heat that I’d been carrying around ever since the war,” though he stood oblivious, “appearing undone.” The author attempts to make sense of his seemingly senseless death, yet the focus is narrow, the ending abrupt and the emotion still raw.
Readers of this troubling account will be eager to rediscover The Upstairs Room.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-933633-55-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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