An unflattering portrait, perhaps exacerbated by an infelicitous translation.
The memoir of Kamila, a Lebanese Muslim woman whose novelist daughter (Only in London, 2001, etc.) takes on the voice of her mother to tell her story.
Al-Shakyh begins in 1932, when her unschooled mother was also seven, living in poverty in a village outside Beirut. After she moved to Beirut to live with extended family, Kamila, whose views of life were shaped by romantic movies, fell in love with 17-year-old Muhammad. Forced at age 14 to marry her widowed, much older brother-in-law, she had her first child at 15 and her second (the author) three years later. Older family members took care of her children while the pretty, cunning Kamila stole money from her husband, mocked him at prayer and carried on an affair with Muhammad. Eventually she divorced, leaving her children behind, and married her lover. Marriage to Muhammad, however, was far from romantic, and she was soon overwhelmed by the responsibilities of running a household and exhausted by multiple pregnancies. Muhammad’s accidental death left her a widow at age 34 with five children to support. Especially vulnerable because she was a woman who could neither read nor write, Kamila somehow kept her family together, though the details are vague. She evaded or conned creditors and surrounded herself with women who gave each other moral support. The author tells less about the later years of her mother’s life, part of which she spent with family in Kuwait and later San Diego, where she appears as an unhappy, isolated woman and an interfering mother-in-law. The author returns to her own voice to end her mother’s story in Beirut, where Kamila died in 2001. The picture that emerges of a devious woman struggling to make her way in a rigid, male-dominated society is clear, but the prose is often trite and the chronology murky. A dramatis personae and occasional footnotes aid readers unfamiliar with Lebanese history or Muslim culture.
An unflattering portrait, perhaps exacerbated by an infelicitous translation.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37820-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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