Invaluable not only for aficionados of contemporary Latin writing but also for scholars tracking film’s impact on serious...
An affectionately explicit biography of genre-bending Argentinean novelist Puig (1932–90), written by a translator and friend.
Levine (Spanish and Portuguese/Univ. of California) begins by reconstructing the small-town Argentinean world whose stifling boredom drove Puig’s mother Malé almost nightly to the movies with her precocious son. Romances and musicals provided the effeminate Puig with a dreamy exile from the machismo and homophobia that surrounded him on all sides in the outside world. His distaste for life in Péronist Argentina was reflected in his rocky rejection of his father Baldo. Levine’s candid use of Puig’s alternately discreet and graphic letters and conversation helps to describe the process by which Puig first became conscious of his homosexuality and eventually concluded that it was an unalterable part of himself. Handsome, volatile, and penny-pinching, Puig maintained a strict discipline in regard to his writing, which he practiced every day whether he was at home or on one of his increasingly frequent journeys abroad (usually in the company of his beloved mother). Levine demonstrates how such works as Puig’s autobiographical Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971) and his prison-cell melodrama Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979) recycle “the debris of mass culture”—newspaper soap serials, detective stories, B-movie plots, etc. In Puig’s world, characters never integrate emotion and sex into sustained adult relationships—much in the same way that Puig, fearful of aging without “a husband” despite international homage, never quite grappled with his own uneasy truths before his early (and somewhat suspicious) death from complications that arose after gallbladder surgery. Levine (The Subversive Scribe, 1991), who collaborated with Puig on English versions of his novels, canvassed film archives, interviewed surviving friends, and combed through Puig’s abundant unpublished writings to construct a somewhat disheveled life-story befitting Puig’s motley existence.
Invaluable not only for aficionados of contemporary Latin writing but also for scholars tracking film’s impact on serious revisionary literature. (b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-28190-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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