In this lyrical account of illness and nearly dying, moments of beauty are interspersed between longer sections of cryptic...
A coma inspired this renowned writer to reflect on his life, his work, and what it means to die.
Kaniuk, an Israeli artist and writer who died in 2013, was 74 when he developed a cancerous growth in his colon. The growth was removed, but Kaniuk spent four months in a coma and several months after that in a dreamlike trance, hovering between the two more definite states that have given his new book its title. In this “autobiographical novel” originally published in Israel in 2007, Kaniuk (1948, 2012, etc.) describes that experience: the confusion of the surgical theater, the recurring infections and other complications, the long-drawn-out recovery. More than all that, though, he focuses on the hallucinatory months when he drifted in and out of consciousness. As he says, “I felt like the monk who didn’t know if he dreamed he was a donkey or if he was the donkey who dreamed he was a monk.” He shifts from descriptions of memories to dreams to waking life, sometimes within the same sentence. By doing so, he undermines the standard assumption that only lucid consciousness can be comprehensible. “And why is it really so important to know if all that was true or not?” he writes. “If I think I saw, I saw.” In this way he links the experience to a lifetime’s habit of invention. “I would make up reality and I still do,” he writes. If his looping sentences sometimes make his precise meaning difficult to determine, it’s a forgivable quirk. Still, the book’s shapelessness becomes tiresome after a while. One longs for a moment of clean, clear lucidity. Instead, the narrative ravels outward.
In this lyrical account of illness and nearly dying, moments of beauty are interspersed between longer sections of cryptic obscurity.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 9781632060921
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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