by Karl Ove Knausgaard translated by Ingvild Burkey illustrated by Anna Bjerger ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2018
A somber, philosophical addendum to My Struggle and a fine stand-alone meditation on mortality and fatherhood as well.
The third book in Knausgaard’s quartet of seasonal observations takes a more novelistic (and funereal) turn.
In the prior installments in this series, Autumn (2017) and Winter (2018), Knausgaard welcomed his infant daughter to the world through a series of short observational essays about everyday life; becoming a new father was a kind of writing prompt, inspiring him to re-experience life as if through a child’s eyes. This volume is a novella that more directly recalls his epic My Struggle series, driven by the same intensely analytical impulses but applying a narrative scrim upon them. As the book opens, Karl Ove is preparing his children for the day and planning to drive the infant girl to visit her mother. Knausgaard delays explaining why mom isn’t at home, nor does he immediately explain why he had to pay a visit to Sweden’s Child Protection Service the previous summer. There are hints, though, in the themes that Knausgaard keeps returning to as he ferries his child: parental anger, connection, depression, and suicide. As in the My Struggle series, Knausgaard approaches the story with a mix of quotidian depiction (at this point we know more about his bowel movements than those of any writer of consequence since antiquity) and a Proustian attention to the ineffable. The perils a child puts herself through prompts him to contemplate our fragility, how “to be alive is to be always in proximity of death.” Because mortality is so much on his mind, the minor domestic calamity in the closing pages (he’s low on gas, out of money, and left the baby’s bottle behind) takes on a life-or-death tension. If we neglect simple things, how else are we neglectful? And how much harm are we unwittingly bringing upon others, especially those we love most?
A somber, philosophical addendum to My Struggle and a fine stand-alone meditation on mortality and fatherhood as well.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56336-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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