From the master of the absurdist novel, an ordinary tale of moviemaking. Many of John Irving’s novels have been made into motion picture features over the years, including The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, and A Prayer for Owen Meany (which Hollywood retitled Simon Birch). He wrote screenplays for two of his works, Setting Free the Bears and A Son of the Circus, but never got them as far as the screen. Now he focuses on the making of The Cider House Rules in exhaustive and excruciating detail. The film, starring Michael Caine and Tobey Maguire, will be released in conjunction with the book—or rather, the book will be released in conjunction with the film, since the film is likely the bigger money-making prospect. And so, on the evidence here, it should be. Irving mentions in passing that he was once told that a novel should be larger—more complex and more interesting—than a newspaper story about real life. So too, he might have reasoned, should a memoir move beyond a mere recounting of what happened to a particular person at a particular time. But Irving gets so lost in telling stories of every change he made in every draft, of characters lost, of scenes deleted, of motivations corrupted, that he never gets around to telling a story of his own. It is as if he had made a deal when The Cider House Rules went into production that if he were upset about any compromises, he could write a book of his own detailing everything that was left out. The obvious problem here is that he already did so: Anyone who wants to know his original intentions can read his novel. A secondary problem is that the catalogue of details will make little sense to those who have not both read the book and seen the film. If Irving had treated this subject as fiction, it would have been a much more grippingly incredible story.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50368-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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