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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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