Roth has used the relationship between his life and art in a gimmicky way in his fiction, and even his brutal memoir The Facts (1988) was not free of this defect. Now, however, he discards all the artifices in this searing account of his 86-year-old father's physical decline and death. "You must not forget anything," Roth admonishes himself at the end of this father-and-son tale, and indeed, from the detail accumulated here, one doubts that his eye, unerring ear, and memory have missed a thing. Misdiagnosed at first as having a viral infection that caused temporary paralysis to one side of the face, father Herman Roth soon learned the bleaker truth: he had a brain tumor. As this once-vigorous retired Newark insurance manager refused to go gentle into that good night, Philip watched with mingled awe and fear. The only respites from this harrowing procession of bodily disasters—including diminished eyesight and incontinence—are flashbacks that provide fascinating glimpses into American Jewish life in the first half of this century—as well as into Roth père, a blunt perfectionist who sometimes drove his late wife, children, and loved ones to distraction (after being advised of the need for an operation, Herman lashes out at his long-suffering companion for not opening a can of soup correctly). Even before Philip has his own terrifying brush with death in an emergency quintuple bypass operation, he realizes that his father taught and embodied "the vernacular, unpoetic and unexpressive and point-blank, with all the vernacular's glaring limitations and all its durable force." An elegy of overwhelming horror and pity—filled with Roth's graceful prose and narrative control, but also with a humanity sometimes missing in his other work.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 1990
ISBN: 0679752935
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
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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