A pungent, woebegone tale of emotionally crippling loneliness.
Walker unspools in detail the dark psychological results of excruciating inhibition and loneliness.
Being rejected is always hurtful, but sometimes it’s crushing. In Walker’s case, a childhood friend spurned him, maybe even playfully. He turned inward and his reluctance to socialize widened the chasm between him and his peers, making him increasingly odd. Young Walker fancies himself a bit of an outlaw, but in reality he begins to fixate on his mother’s love in an unwholesome way. An outlet arrives: masturbation (if "serial killer” never bears fruit, Walker gives serial masturbator a run for its money). He finds pornography "soothing,” though the vibrancy of his incestuous feelings remains disturbingly taboo. The author comes across as neither self-hating nor self-amused, but haunted. There is plenty to be repulsed by here–Walker running away from home when he’s old enough to leave, sad trips in which he sinks deep into decrepitude before calling home to be rescued and his sordid fantasies of the opposite sex–and the author gets flamboyantly raunchy about his masturbation. Yet the story is compellingly painful, as it focuses on a kid in pathetic straits. There is a steady pulse to the writing, despite its circling details, and Walker even inserts humor into his unlovely life, as when a porn-shop owner shoots him a look when he inquires about incest magazines–"It’s unusual for a merchant to give you eyes since they have to make their sale, but this guy did. This from a man who sold porn for a living.” If Walker is not a killer, his fury is real–a lightness enters him during an assault fantasy and a heaviness returns afterward, gnawing like a rat. He finds something nearing salvation through the written word and finally a woman.
A pungent, woebegone tale of emotionally crippling loneliness.Pub Date: April 5, 2002
ISBN: 978-1-58898-608-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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