A candid portrayal of wartime privations is followed by a blur of unexamined events.
The grandson of artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) recalls his adolescence in Nazi-occupied France.
Most of Matisse’s debut memoir focuses on his experiences during World War II, when he abetted his father’s underground missions; attended schools where he suffered from lice, bullies, and censorious administrators; and nearly starved on meager food rations. In Paris, he sometimes got vitamin cookies from the Red Cross, donated by American Quakers. His clothing was “a hodgepodge of hand-me-downs” that he quickly outgrew. For the most part, the author captures his teenage voice and perspective, imbuing the memoir with the tone of a picaresque novel. He portrays himself as daring, sassy, and curious. His curiosity makes all the more unbelievable the mystery at the heart of the book: the missing Matisse of the title, it turns out, is not one of his grandfather’s paintings but the author’s identity. When he was 12, before enrolling him in a boarding school, his mother told him that he was to be known by another surname, not Matisse, adding no explanation. Nor did the author ask about this sudden change even though he forthrightly asked about much else. He wondered if he was really the son of the man he called Papa, whom he respected and loved. After the vivid chapters that take place during the war, the narrative loses momentum. While living in Normandy, Matisse learned that his parents divorced, which shocked him, but his mother offered little explanation. A few weeks later he got word that his mother was dying, destitute, in a run-down hospital, an incredible fate for the daughter-in-law of France’s most famous artist. But again, there was no explanation. Inexplicably estranged from his once-adored Papa, Matisse, married, moved to Canada and later the United States. He divorced three times and finally met the love of his life.
A candid portrayal of wartime privations is followed by a blur of unexamined events.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1496413833
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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