Studded with insights and with prose as elegant as that in either writer’s fiction, these letters delineate an epistolary...
The correspondence of New Yorker editor William Maxwell and poet, short-story writer, and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner.
The letters range, as Maxwell puts it, over “poetry, casuals, sculptures, and Gregorian chant.” The pair only met three times, but Maxwell edited Warner’s work for years, and their correspondence sustained them both through rough patches. We learn of Carl Van Doren’s anxieties that an installment of a great novel might be lost in the mails (this was before the days of floppy disks), of the death of old friends, of Warner’s love for Provence, of Maxwell’s regret that he did not read the Victorian novelists at a younger age. We learn about the writers’ attitudes toward religion and their opinions on bedroom fireplaces. We read Warner praising the sparing beauty of Maxwell’s prose (he wrote fiction on the side), and we learn which fictional details Maxwell likes best (in one case, a portion of oxtail stew). The letters abound in moving, heartfelt observations as simple as Maxwell’s of September 20, 1966: “Rooting in the attic,” he found five or six of Warner’s letters from the 1930s and quietly observed, “We have been writing to each other for about thirty years now.” There is precious little name-dropping, and the editor avoids excessive annotation. Steinman (English/Nassau Community College), who previously edited Maxwell’s correspondence with Frank O’Connor (The Happiness of Getting It Down Right, 1996), should also be thanked for including as an appendix Maxwell’s previously uncollected short memoir of Warner, “What You Can’t Hang Onto.” The only texts missing here are Warner’s collected works, so we could see for ourselves just how brilliant and insightful Maxwell’s notoriously brilliant and insightful editorial comments really were.
Studded with insights and with prose as elegant as that in either writer’s fiction, these letters delineate an epistolary friendship that makes 84 Charing Cross Road look dull.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-118-3
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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