Read as either a meditative essay or a revealing confessional poem, this is a thoughtful, reflective look at one talented...
A chronic diarist discovers that there’s a lot to be said for putting your pen down.
There seems be a pattern with Manguso. The more weighty and personal her books get, dealing with everything from her own dread illness (Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, 2008) to a friend's suicide (The Guardians: An Elegy, 2012), the shorter they are. Her latest is remarkably brief, with more white space than print, devoted to the seemingly dull topic of why she quit her diary. But the brevity is the point: Where Manguso’s 25-year journal was obsessively detailed, this eulogy doesn’t have a wasted word. She’s a Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis, both in the way she distills complex thoughts on time and memory into pure essence and in how she examines writing as a means of control. “I didn’t want to lose anything,” Manguso states at the beginning. “That was my main problem. I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.” The diary eventually became a crutch for survival: “If I allowed myself to drift through undocumented time for more than a day, I’d be swept up, no longer able to remember the purpose of continuing.” Keeping a diary meant imposing a shape or structure on life, a view that changed when motherhood ruptured her own space-time continuum: “I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity, a background of ongoing time for him to live against.” While Manguso’s thoughts are inward, they work outward—from her life to life itself.
Read as either a meditative essay or a revealing confessional poem, this is a thoughtful, reflective look at one talented writer’s creative evolution.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1555977030
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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