Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing...
Breathless, halting memoir in fragments by the English stylist, friend and biographer of Aldous Huxley, and late-blooming novelist.
Bedford begins in the middle of her life, in 1953, when she’s in her early 40s, meandering happily in Switzerland and savoring the publication of her first novel. By fits and starts, she then moves back in time, noting that in Italy after WWII, on the island of Ischia, when she was 36, she and her journalist friend Martha Gellhorn (post-Hemingway) ran into an old family acquaintance, the so-called “Kraut Baronessa,” who had married a German diplomat and worked on the “wrong side” of the war (friendly with Franco, among others); seeing her evokes the Italian aristocratic milieu of Bedford’s mother, who left her husband and remarried a handsome Italian, Alessandro, and would summon her daughter, living in the English Midlands, to spend the summers with her. Gradually, the full story emerges: Bedford’s loafing Monte Carlo collector father and wealthy, fickle mother raised her for a spell at a grand country house in the southwest corner of Germany before separating to glamorous far-flung regions; eventually, the nearly illiterate daughter ran away from home to find her married half-sister, Jacko, in Rome. Despite her lack of formal education, young Bedford wanted to be a writer, and composed several unpublished novels before her middle-aged coup, all the while journeying across Europe and Mexico with friends such as her mentor Pierre Mimerel, a social philosopher, and Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, who orchestrated Bedford’s hasty marriage to one of their “bugger friends” in order to secure an English passport. It’s a shifting, erratic journey through the century, most affecting when Bedford halts to describe her mother’s descent into morphine addiction, while the 20 later years, living in sunny climes with American Eda Lord, are dismissed in a paragraph.
Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing her nine other works.)Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-169-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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