A master of fiction turns to non-fiction for this narrative of a sailor who was shipwrecked for 10 days on the Caribbean before being washed ashore in his native Colombia, half-dead. Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Laureate famed for his novels, actually wrote this short essay as a series of newspaper articles over 30 years ago in Bogota. Writing in the voice of the sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, the author narrates how Velasco had set sail from Mobile, Alabama, in a ship laden with contraband goods. Struck by an ominous storm, Velasco and four of his mates were pitched into the sea, where Velasco watched all of them drown in turn before he miraculously spotted one of the ship's life rafts floating on the turbulent sea towards him. Himself nearly drowning, Velasco managed one last Herculean effort to reach the raft. Therein begins his harrowing tale of fighting off daily rounds of hunger, thirst, blazing sun, and sharks as he drifts aimlessly, yet measurably, toward Colombia. Though near death upon his salvation on a deserted beach, Velasco suddenly finds himself a hero to the peasants who discover him, and he spends some time thereafter trying to peddle his story for money. Garcia Marquez spent 120 hours interviewing Velasco (which amounts to over an hour per page); and the result shows in its detail. When the articles first appeared, Garcia Marquez's name was not used (they were signed by Velasco himself). But the story is undeniably Garcia Marquez; there is a fatalism here which fits neatly into the normal scheme of his great fiction: at no time does Velasco ever really interfere with his fate or grasp any opportunity to transcend his situation. Rather, he drifts and Fate decrees that his direction is toward survival. A tailor-made tale for the author—himself a drifter from his native land—and one that gives great insight into his early years as a writer. To be read for that reason alone.
Pub Date: April 25, 1986
ISBN: 067972205X
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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