An artful analysis of the lives of two poets separated by centuries, geography, and culture, united by hope.
A biographer and former professor examines the texts and contexts of Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of Omar Khayyam’s medieval quatrains, initially ignored but later a worldwide publishing success.
Richardson (Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature, 2013, etc.), a winner of the Bancroft Prize, is uniquely qualified for his task. The biographer of William James, Thoreau, and Emerson and editor of anthologies of poetry, Richardson compresses these two lives into fewer than 200 tight pages, but the compression generates significant light. He acknowledges that little is known about Khayyam, but he weaves some significance from the few threads that remain. Born to a tentmaker in 1048, Khayyam later became involved with some powerful Persians and wrote myriads of quatrains, some finding their ways to the Bodleian Library, where FitzGerald (1809-1883) found them. Fascinated by what he found, he studied Persian with a friend and spent much of the rest of his life translating and tinkering. He lived to produce several editions of his book. Richardson writes about the life of each man, revealing in his sections about FitzGerald an astonishing series of influences and friends, including Thackeray, Tennyson, Carlyle, and others. The author is also curious (though not excessively so) about FitzGerald’s sexuality—he had a brief marriage but far preferred the friendship of men. Richardson ruminates about the nature of translation, noting that Khayyam’s quatrains were self-contained, not linked in a narrative, a situation that FitzGerald altered. The author credits FitzGerald for making the verses appeal to all sorts of modern (and, now, contemporary) readers. Finally, he lists what he sees as the values of the work—among them, its “ungendered vision of love” and its hope that maybe we can all get along.
An artful analysis of the lives of two poets separated by centuries, geography, and culture, united by hope.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-653-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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.”
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ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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.
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ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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