A heartfelt story that tackles grief through an honest, powerful lens.
Jourdan’s background as a musician and translator comes through in a gripping debut memoir about his mother.
In raw, lyrical prose, Jourdan deftly renders the worlds he lived in. After growing up in Portugal but leaving to attend boarding school, Jourdan and his sister travel back to Portugal to see their mother in the hospital. They don’t know the particulars of what happened, only that it’s serious; their father told them to prepare for the worst. Jourdan’s mother dies shortly after they arrive, and Jourdan spends the rest of his visit in her home, trying to discover more about the woman whom he adored to the point of idealization. He develops the “mystical” side of loving a parent, not just “psychoanalysis’s scientific pretenses.” Jourdan uses his upbringing to capture his mother as “an object.” She was fiercely loyal, intelligent, gentle and kind—all qualities that allowed her to help Jourdan when he suffered several psychotic breakdowns. A skilled writer with a sharp voice, the author establishes his perspective from the start: “Why shouldn’t the Oedipal situation happen much later than it was once fashionable to suppose?” Readers may also be startled to find a list of grievances the author has against a variety of people, from those who knew his mother to her doctors to her former lovers to a large woman—a “cunt”—he saw at the park while dog-walking as a teenager. The purpose of this rant is not entirely clear. It undermines the connection the reader feels with the mother—a connection Jourdan establishes beautifully in the rest of the book. “Dear everybody who loved my mother: I know. It’s sad and it’s a tragedy,” he writes. “I know, so please stop saying it.”
A heartfelt story that tackles grief through an honest, powerful lens.Pub Date: May 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1780992648
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Zero Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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