Another illuminating facet to the endlessly compelling story of modern India.
Anglo-Indian novelist and musician Chaudhuri (Contemporary Literature/Univ. of East Anglia; The Immortals, 2009, etc.) navigates the complicated business of Calcutta’s richly diverse Bengali-English makeup.
Nostalgic and probing, the author’s account of his native Bengali city that was never really his own encapsulates countless humming, modern Indian stories. Once the British Empire’s colonial capital, an elegant Victorian, culturally diverse merchant town, Calcutta fell on bad economic times and into Marxist political turbulence from the 1970s onward, provoking the migration of the middle class and creating an enormous discrepancy of wealth. Chaudhuri, though born in Calcutta in 1962, grew up mostly in Bombay, though the author returned to Calcutta intermittently, spending holidays at his uncle’s house (which inspired much of his fiction, he writes), before his parents moved back to Calcutta in 1989. Eventually, Chaudhuri found his voice as an author in a kind of “renaissance” that the city also experienced at about the same time. He continually attempts to find within the Calcutta makeup “concordances” with other places that he has found transformative and life-affirming—e.g., the movement from “urban dereliction into something compelling.” Educated in England, well-spoken and a member of the privileged bhadralok (genteel Bengali bourgeois) class, the author can move among castes for keen observations, from befriending the ubiquitous squalid street entrepreneurs on Free School Street to taking high tea with the Ingabanga Mukherjee couple on Lower Circular Road. Names fascinate the author, as they indicate the demise of the Bengali language, and he devotes an entire chapter to the recent mystifying elections. Ever a journalist, novelist and literary critic, he is transported by others’ stories and relays in his prose a vivid sense of time and place.
Another illuminating facet to the endlessly compelling story of modern India.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-27024-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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