A potent narrative that builds from matter-of-fact observation through horrific experience toward a metaphysical acceptance...
Subtle meditation and devastating detail combine in this journalistic memoir of refugee landings on the Italian island of Lampedusa.
A prizewinning playwright in his native Italy, Enia (On Earth as It Is in Heaven, 2014, etc.) relies on the skills he sharpened as a journalist to recount the often deadly plight of exiles traveling over treacherous waters from Africa to Europe. Yet those depths also provide a backdrop for more intimate accounts—of a close friend who succumbed to cancer and an uncle who is suffering the same. In the aftermath of a particularly calamitous shipwreck—only 155 survivors landed on Lampedusa of the more than 500 who had begun the voyage—one rescuer observed, “It’s normal, isn’t it? You see someone in the water, you lean over from the deck of the boat and you do your best to grab him. Anyone who sees a person drowning does whatever he can to rescue him. It’s not like we’re heroes, after all.” Such instinctive decency triumphs over polarized politics or fear of the “other”—a fear that can go both ways, as many of the African refugees have apparently never seen white skin before. The author’s companion witness on the island is his father, a retired physician–turned-photographer who is both loving and reticent. The two communicate through the words the son writes, the images the father captures, and the silences that are pregnant with meaning between the two. “In doing portraits of faces, my father could sense the disintegration of life,” writes Enia, continuing, “it was my father’s way of trying to start a dialogue with God Himself, a dialogue that contained both an effort to understand and a conscious abandonment of self to the mystery of existence.” Like the sea itself, that mystery is fathoms deep, encapsulated in a multilayered narrative that attempts to come to terms with the universality of mortality.
A potent narrative that builds from matter-of-fact observation through horrific experience toward a metaphysical acceptance that is something like a state of grace.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-908-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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