A fascinating look into a prolific author’s mind, especially welcome since there have not been enough English translations...
A memoir caught in the throes of linguistic biculturalism.
“My greatest fear has always been that I might leave myself open to ridicule,” writes Kallifatides, the Greek writer and translator who has spent most of his life in Sweden. “Write something so dire that even the gulls flying over Stömmen would snigger. I was more afraid of writing badly than not writing at all.” He begins at a moment that most writers experience, at times devastatingly so: the inability to write. Frantic about his writer’s block, Kallifatides meditates on the act of writing and its many different shapes. Unlike most memoirs, which follow the writer’s life more or less from start to finish (or present day), this brief book throws readers directly into the author’s exploration of his biculturalism. Born in Greece in 1938, Kallifatides immigrated in 1963 to Sweden, where he spent the majority of his life and wrote his books (in Swedish). When the memoir opens, the author is looking for ways in which he can use his experiences in Sweden to fuel his writing practice—to no avail. So he and his wife set off for Greece to revisit his childhood home and walk through the streets of his lost city. Acting as both citizen and visitor, Kallifatides is stuck between two cultures. This comes at a price, as he has forgotten much of the Greek language. “My forgetfulness was not a coincidence but evidence that I was distancing myself from myself,” he writes. Readers witness the author’s efforts to overcome his writer’s block through countless meditations on a writer’s motivation, the culture interwoven in language, and language as a tool through which identity is created. Kallifatides has written an unusual and refreshing memoir that uses critical theory to explain an individual behavior.
A fascinating look into a prolific author’s mind, especially welcome since there have not been enough English translations of his books.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-945-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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