Very much the work of a writer conscious of his role as a political man of letters. Much of what he finds interesting may...
A momentous year for Germany and the author, as detailed in a journal published more than two decades after the fact.
In 1990, nine years before he would win the Nobel Prize for literature, Grass (The Box: Tales from the Darkroom, 2010, etc.) experienced a year of such turmoil that he thought it might be worth documenting in a daily journal, even though, he writes at the outset, “I am not one of those people who love keeping a journal. Something unusual must be happening to inflict this ritual on me.” The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rush toward German unification, about which the author’s attitude ranged from profound ambivalence to outright resistance, provided the spur, as the political and economic climate in his homeland would tempt Grass to renounce his German citizenship and cause critics to disparage him as “the nation’s pessimist” or even a traitor. Though he shows no reluctance to “challenge the politicians’ pieties and spit in the unity soup,” even Grass wonders whether he is “merely a captive of the past, a dinosaur.” The author is not usually prone to intimate confession, but he provides a daily account of a year that saw Germany win the World Cup, his extended family experience a birth, a wedding and a death, and the author ponder various conceptual permutations of what would become his next novel, The Call of the Toad. Some of the most entertaining passages are those that seem out of character—e.g., “Poked my head into the minibar, which contained three bottles, nothing else. I thought I was pouring a glass of mineral water and found myself downing vodka, and a minute ago, instead of my cigarillo, I stuck half a pretzel stick in my mouth and sucked and sucked on it.”
Very much the work of a writer conscious of his role as a political man of letters. Much of what he finds interesting may not interest readers two decades after the fact.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-36460-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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