A delightful fantasy, generously shared.
A freelance journalist’s wry, charming account of her intermittent affair with a romantic stranger.
Fraser (Losing It, 1997) opens her memoir with the phrase that transfixes her as she sits in an adult-ed Italian class: Mi hai spaccato il cuore (You have broken my heart). Her recovery from the collapse of her marriage (her husband of one year has dumped her for his high school sweetheart) begins with an impulsive trip to Ischia, in the south of Italy. Her spirits rebound amazingly when a fling with a Parisian art professor develops into a sequence of episodes in a variety of picturesque spots, including the Italian Alps, London, the Aeolian Islands, Marrakesh, and her hometown of San Francisco. The author paints each encounter in elegant and luxurious detail: The landscapes, hotel rooms, meals, scents, and sounds that she evokes in meticulous second-person prose get, and deserve, as much attention as her evolving relationship with the professor. Unsurprisingly, sensuous lovemaking, spectacular Mediterranean scenery, and sumptuous dinners gradually restore the author’s confidence and sense of well-being. Throughout an account that might easily have degenerated into self-indulgence, the writer’s voice remains remarkably brisk and clear-eyed, neither idealizing her occasional lover nor sentimentalizing her own emotional journey. If she has few startling insights to offer about heartbreak or healing, and if her solution is not easily imitated, the smart one-liners and unpretentious, witty asides that pepper the narrative are more than ample compensation. “You aren’t prepared for this,” she confides, recounting her first night with her lover. “You grew up being reminded that you should always wear nice clean underwear in case you have to go to the doctor suddenly, but no one ever said anything about wearing sexy ones in case you run into a French aesthetics professor on an island.” But with or without the right underwear, Fraser emerges triumphant and zestful.
A delightful fantasy, generously shared.Pub Date: June 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-42065-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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