Repetitive, smarmy and self-satisfied. Slumming never seemed quite so bourgeois.
Dissolute writer with a yen for rough trade goes to Romania, finds rough Romanian.
Novelist Benderson (User, 1994, etc.) lards his account of an obsessive, nine-month affair with a Romanian hustler with sentences like the following: “No one has to explain to me that the forces we depleted bourgeois intellectuals sometimes borrow for our transgressive narratives never free themselves from their unstable sources.” The author’s pseudo-boyfriend Romulus never quite shed his scam-artist attitude or gave up heterosexual flings during their relationship. Ah well, the perils of transgression. The writer first showed up in Bucharest in 1999 on a weeklong assignment for an editor who wanted a good story about brothels, “something personal and literary.” Wolfish, devilishly handsome young Romulus became almost overnight an obsession for Benderson, who immersed himself not only in a starved, priapic worship of his new beau, but in the ancient reek of Romania’s tortured past. Fortunately for the author, that history is a pretty juicy soap opera, especially the story of Carol II, last king of the pre-Fascist era, and his half-Jewish mistress Lupescu, who was turned by popular anti-Semitic legend into a Mata Hari/Cleopatra hybrid responsible for the country’s supposed degeneration. Carol’s relationship with his domineering mother Marie provides more grist for Benderson’s imagination, as he endlessly ponders the parallels between that dynamic and his own Oedipal-lite bond with an overpowering mom. For hundreds of pages, the author tries to find grand meaning in his tawdry affair, whose banality he realizes long after the reader has. Explosive descriptions of decadent Romanian cities and the Iron Curtain–wracked countryside are about all that enliven this swooning, tedious book.
Repetitive, smarmy and self-satisfied. Slumming never seemed quite so bourgeois.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-58542-478-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
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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