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
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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