A fresh and color-drenched memoir by an artist unafraid to offend.
Vivid portraits, affectionate but unsparing, of people encountered by Nobel laureate Canetti (Notes from Hampstead, 1998, etc.) while living in England.
Canetti (1905–94) was very social, and he encountered a good swathe of personalities from the moment he arrived in England in 1939. He found warmth, sensitivity and integrity in the ordinary folks who swept streets and rented rooms. He was less taken with the artists, intellectuals, politicians and aristocrats who constituted the bulk of his acquaintance (and a cross-section of England’s hierarchy). T.S. Eliot represented for Canetti all that was thin-lipped, cold-hearted and prematurely old in British life. Of Eliot’s fame, he writes, “Is it possible ever to repent sufficiently of that?” He was just as judgmental about Iris Murdoch, though she had been his occasional lover: “Iris is what I would call an ‘illegitimate’ writer. She never suffered from having to write.” Recounting his associations with a panorama of English characters, Canetti is by turns a memoirist, satirist and anthropologist. The volcanic emotions expressed here are perhaps best understood as his response to the chilliness of British manners. He hated the polite, implacably hierarchal laws of English society, a stance that allowed him to admire Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s passion while stating that “I don’t know that I have ever encountered anyone quite so antithetical to everything I stand for.” He found more common ground with thoughtful eccentrics like the inventor Geoffrey Pyke and the Orientalist Arthur Waley. Before leaving for Zurich in 1984, Canetti got off a final salvo, this one at Margaret Thatcher’s government: “the claque of the apostles of selfishness.”
A fresh and color-drenched memoir by an artist unafraid to offend.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-8112-1636-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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