A fascinating look into a prolific author’s mind, especially welcome since there have not been enough English translations...
A memoir caught in the throes of linguistic biculturalism.
“My greatest fear has always been that I might leave myself open to ridicule,” writes Kallifatides, the Greek writer and translator who has spent most of his life in Sweden. “Write something so dire that even the gulls flying over Stömmen would snigger. I was more afraid of writing badly than not writing at all.” He begins at a moment that most writers experience, at times devastatingly so: the inability to write. Frantic about his writer’s block, Kallifatides meditates on the act of writing and its many different shapes. Unlike most memoirs, which follow the writer’s life more or less from start to finish (or present day), this brief book throws readers directly into the author’s exploration of his biculturalism. Born in Greece in 1938, Kallifatides immigrated in 1963 to Sweden, where he spent the majority of his life and wrote his books (in Swedish). When the memoir opens, the author is looking for ways in which he can use his experiences in Sweden to fuel his writing practice—to no avail. So he and his wife set off for Greece to revisit his childhood home and walk through the streets of his lost city. Acting as both citizen and visitor, Kallifatides is stuck between two cultures. This comes at a price, as he has forgotten much of the Greek language. “My forgetfulness was not a coincidence but evidence that I was distancing myself from myself,” he writes. Readers witness the author’s efforts to overcome his writer’s block through countless meditations on a writer’s motivation, the culture interwoven in language, and language as a tool through which identity is created. Kallifatides has written an unusual and refreshing memoir that uses critical theory to explain an individual behavior.
A fascinating look into a prolific author’s mind, especially welcome since there have not been enough English translations of his books.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-945-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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