Sure to interest Godwin’s constant readers, but others may wish for future volumes written by a more mature writer.
The sentimental education of now-eminent novelist Godwin (Unfinished Desires, 2010, etc.).
This second volume of her journals begins when the author was 26, exhibiting all the angsty personal concerns of a 26-year-old, blended with bookish interests in intellectual matters such as the suffering existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and the psychology of Carl Jung. She has given up a husband and a fledgling career in journalism and has moved to a tiny flat in London, where she cultivated her “dramatic self” and gathered experiences that she later put to good use in her writing. The journals are self-absorbed and a touch juvenile (why should they not be?), as Godwin writes, “I am astonished by who I am and what I have done. The dangerous thing is to judge myself by the standards of other people.” The early pages show a mix of self-doubt, introspection, and exhortation (“I must write about going to the movies alone and why it is so good”), along with the little writerly gossip she is privy to at such a remove from the American literary scene. Godwin seems neither very likable nor very interesting until, a couple of years into her stay, she opened her eyes to the world around her—a turn that takes particularly effective form as she witnesses Winston Churchill’s funeral—and resolved to become a real writer. Even so, there is scarcely any hint that the 1960s are swirling around her, a flirtation with then-trendy Scientology notwithstanding. Fledgling writers should stick with it, though, since Godwin eventually gets down to business and reveals bits and pieces about the whys and hows of writing and the tough work of getting words on paper (“I don’t like this chapter yet, but will not stop until I capture what I want”).
Sure to interest Godwin’s constant readers, but others may wish for future volumes written by a more mature writer.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6433-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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