An intriguing work that transcends category, drawing from facts but reading like fiction.
In this coming-of-age memoir, a playwright illuminates the culture of the El Paso border as he perceived it when he was young.
Award-winning playwright Solis explains the genesis of his debut book before proceeding to vignettes of his formative years in a border city. First, the title, as he explains it, refers to “a devotional painting…at once visual and literary, [which] records the transgression, the divine mediation and the offering of thanks in a single frame, thus forming a kind of flash-fiction account of that person’s electrifying, life-altering event.” Thus we have a series of self-contained vignettes, though there are some connecting threads—e.g., family, the mysterious outsider boy known only as “Demon,” and the equally mysterious “Runner,” who may be running to something or from something but never stops to explain himself. Solis describes the stories as “disconnected (and yet thoroughly interconnected, noting that, through memory and reconstruction, “I’m trying to figure myself out. I’m coming to terms with who I am by looking back at what I was.” Inevitably, he deals with identity, as a boy born in America to Mexican parents, with sexual awakening, and with the first stirrings of his literary ambitions. The pieces follow a chronological progression, though with a recognition that border issues and tensions are timeless, that “there will always be those who want to come across and those who want to keep them where they are.” By the time he made his first return from college, he viewed his city, family, and origins with a totally fresh perspective. Within these pieces, he aims for a truth that he admits has been filtered through memory and shaped by selection: “I suppose I am using the poetic voice to convey the authentic.”
An intriguing work that transcends category, drawing from facts but reading like fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87286-786-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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