Vera is one of the freshest, most evocative prose writers since Ondaatje, her sophisticated lyricism offering a poised...
Two early novels showing the mesmerizing poeticism of Zimbabwean Vera (Butterfly Burning, 2000), this time in the lives and fortunes of two young women seeking a measure of solace in a war-torn, poverty-ridden, yet naturally beautiful land.
In the more compelling Without a Name (1994), Mazvitza is presented in brief episodic chapters, and the rhythms of the prose—dense, lyric, modestly mythic—lend themselves to the savoring that such short chapters allow. The story is simple: Mazvitza first meets and falls in love with a local village man, Nyenyedzi, but, in search of a vague “freedom,” travels by bus to Harare, the “big city” she has never glimpsed. There, she is taken in by Joel, who offers a sort of safety amid Harare’s flagrant decay, despair, and delight. Joel—intriguing, with a startling quickness about him—soon impregnates, and then discards, Mazvita, who finds herself and her unnamed child alone. In the prizewinning Under the Tongue (1996), Vera offers a more robust plot in the story of how young Zhizha came to find herself in the dreamy residence of her grandmother, her father dead and her mother dying beside her. Zhizha’s father, Muroyiwa, grew up the son of a blind man whose first son went off to fight in the omnipresent “war,” leaving Muroyiwa self-consciously behind. Vera’s prose is delicately engaging as she describes Muroyiwa’s butterfly-hunting trips to the mountains, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise emptying tale of incest and abuse. Zhizha’s mother, Runyararo, a ghostly presence sunk deeply into her illness, is recalled teaching the girl English and celebrating the return of local soldiers from the war. At the close is a surreal recollection of Muroyiwa’s violation of his girl.
Vera is one of the freshest, most evocative prose writers since Ondaatje, her sophisticated lyricism offering a poised tension as it details shattered landscapes, bodies, and dreams.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-53816-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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