Only the French can write, read, and buy such a book in great numbers.
Acclaimed French minimalist Ernaux (Exteriors, 1996, etc.), who has previously created docufictional versions of her past, now takes a violent incident from her childhood and turns it into a work of memory and meditation.
On a Sunday in June after attending Mass, she witnessed her father try to kill her mother. The year was 1952, and the author was going on 12. Her parents had been quarreling and her father was reacting to her mother’s provocations. For the child who saw the attempt, life would never be the same, for from that day on she became aware of the sensation of shame and of seeing all subsequent embarrassments as colored by that event. It becomes the explanatory figure in this very tiny literary carpet she weaves around it. Her family aspired to something better for themselves: She went to private school, her mother was a regular church attendee, and they lived in a respectable quarter of the town. Now they were no better than those they despised for drawing attention to themselves by behaving in uncouth ways. She describes what life was like in her native town in 1952: the fashions, the events, and the town itself. Next, she recalls the moments of shame that now shadow her life: A schoolteacher sees her mother in a soiled nightgown, and she has her own humiliating encounter with a snobbish young girl during a family trip to Lourdes. She notes all the rules her family and school expected her to observe. But, as the author learned, all these anxious acts of propitiation and obedience can be nullified in an instant—respectability, like civilization, is a very fragile fabric. Intense and relentlessly earnest, but as usual Ernaux excels at capturing the exact emotion of an event and an era.
Only the French can write, read, and buy such a book in great numbers.Pub Date: June 15, 1998
ISBN: 1-888363-69-X
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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