A beautiful, moving story that must have been extremely difficult for the author to write. Thankfully for readers, he...
A notable Spanish writer haunted by his family’s allegiances during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) manages to achieve a magnificent reconciliation.
Having addressed the war in previous works of both fiction and nonfiction, Cercas (The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, 2018, etc.) wrestles in this “nonfiction novel” with a persistent obsession: the short life and “glorious death” of a revered member of his family, his great-uncle Manuel Mena, who died at age 19 as an enthusiastic Falangist (the foe of the Republicans) in the Battle of the Ebro in 1938. Mena had been adored by the author’s mother, who lived in the tiny village of Ibahernando in Extremadura. She had been relocated as a young bride to live in Catalonia, and the family had effectively buried Mena’s name. Shame runs at the heart of this story, as the tragedy of the civil war created terrible fissures between Francisco Franco’s loyalists and the Republicans in the tiniest towns of Spain, including the socially stratified village of Ibahernando. Indeed, Cercas had been haunted and obsessed by the shame of his family’s Francoist loyalties his entire life, and he vowed never to write about Mena, although his mother—a kind of long-suffering Beckett-ian character waiting her whole life for a return to the lost glory of her family’s past—hoped he would. Visiting the village and carefully enticing some of the skittish elders who had lived through the war to speak with him, the author clearly illustrates the deep divisions that plagued Spanish society during that tumultuous period. Cercas is a marvelous writer, and his character studies of the elusive Mena are masterly. Ultimately, grappling with the enormously nuanced, continuing story of sacrifice, passion, and dishonor allowed for significant forgiveness and release.
A beautiful, moving story that must have been extremely difficult for the author to write. Thankfully for readers, he persisted.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52090-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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