This jumbled but ever readable account of the expatriate composer and author is not so much a biography as a meditation on the biographical process and its pitfalls. Anticipating the death of Paul Bowles, the last of the Tangiers giants, a full-scale literary industry is beginning to gear up. Bowles himself has never been a particularly prolific author, but each work of fiction, from The Sheltering Sky to the shortest of his short stories, arrived with a resounding fullness to it. A world so complete, so considered, that each work feels like a life’s oeuvre. There’s an elusive archetypal quality to his work that seems to mediate between the noumenal and phenomenal, as if these classic philosophic distinctions were almost resolvable. Like his work, Bowles seems to be just beyond full understanding, a passive acquiescent personality who can’t say no, but is very good at avoiding anything uncomfortable. He is particularly elusive when Dillon (who edited The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles as well as a volume of Jane Bowles’s letters) attempts to tease out the deeply autobiographical elements of his work: “Hadn’t he always been in the process of escaping? Escaping into another room, escaping across borders into another country, escaping into regions within himself, escaping into others, escaping into his characters, even as they too are escaping.” Dillon here has thrown over the traditional biographical method in favor of a free-form approach, part interview, part reminiscence, part autobiography. Based largely on hundreds of hours spent with Bowles, it’s a fascinating mix that doesn’t quite gel, although there are flashes of real insight. The autobiographical elements are overplayed, although such elements as the arrival of a second, rival biographer and Dillon’s sense that she is trapped in a Bowles novel are so intriguing, one excuses their irrelevance. (15 b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-520-21104-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
