An artful, affecting memoir whose lessons arrive in a delicious whisper.
Charmed in youth by a Matisse at the Art Institute of Chicago, a memoirist (I Could Tell You Stories, 1999, etc.) later pursues the painter’s story and discovers more of her own.
Hampl, poet and professor (English/Univ. of Minnesota), has crafted an emotional memoir that begins in 1972, when she first saw the painting, Woman Before an Aquarium. She acknowledges that at the time, she had very little knowledge of the artist or of painting. (She amuses with some sentences about her elementary-school art-class clumsiness.) But something about the serenity of the painting caught her eye, and, later, her imagination; before long, her curiosity was leading her through worlds her blindness had hidden from her. She views the artist’s work in museums around the world; she visits the sites where he lived; on the Riviera, she talks to an ancient nun who knew him at the end of his life. Hampl uses Matisse’s story (and his fondness for the odalisque) to pursue her own interest in the concept of leisure, of having the time to think, to look, to note, to create. She visits this idea in other cultures (with much attention to North Africa), sees how it worked in the lives of other writers she admired, among them her fellow St. Paulian F. Scott Fitzgerald, and most notably, her “pagan saint,” Katherine Mansfield (Hampl visited the hotel room in Bandol where Mansfield wrote Bliss). There is a luscious account of a Turkish bath she once took, an experience she encapsulates with one of her lovely sentences: “This night I’m an odalisque at last, all fish, all float.” Images of water and fish and blue backgrounds and bright sunlight and religion occur throughout, and when they reappear, it’s as if an old and valued friend has returned bearing another gift.
An artful, affecting memoir whose lessons arrive in a delicious whisper.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101506-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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