“Bright though they are in color, blossoms fall,” Iyer hears schoolchildren singing. “Which of us escapes the world of...
The acclaimed travel writer and journalist meditates on the impermanence of life.
Like many others, Iyer (The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, 2014, etc.) reveres the beauty and portent of autumn. Japan, he writes, wants the world to think of it as the land of cherry blossoms, “but it’s the reddening of the maple leaves under a blaze of ceramic-blue skies that is the place’s secret heart.” Iyer—who divides his time between California, where he cares for his mother, and Japan with his wife, Hiroko, and her two adult children from a previous marriage—writes that autumn “poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying.” The author chronicles how Hiroko’s nonagenarian father had recently died. Her mother, whose memory was failing, complained, “I have two children…and I have to live in a nursing home. Until I die.” The second child is Masahiro, who severed all contact with his family. Throughout the narrative, the author mixes musings on the ephemerality of existence with scenes of quotidian life, most notably his visits to the local ping-pong club for “maverick games on Saturday afternoons” with elderly club patrons with vivid memories of the war. Some readers may be put off by Iyer’s decision to render Hiroko’s English dialogue in fragments—e.g., “you remember last week, I go parent house little check my father thing?” Late in the book, he refers to her “homemade, ideogrammatic English,” but the rendering will still strike some as insensitive. Otherwise, this is a thoughtful work with many poignant moments, as when Iyer and Hiroko take her mother on a drive past Kyoto’s temples and, in a moment of clarity, she starts crying when she remembers visiting them with her husband.
“Bright though they are in color, blossoms fall,” Iyer hears schoolchildren singing. “Which of us escapes the world of change?” This moving work reinforces the importance of finding beauty before disaster strikes.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49393-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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