A slim, poetic self-portrait that opens up as you read it and stays in the mind.
A writer's life, solitary and complex, broken apart—not into shards but puzzle pieces.
In Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015), poet and essayist Manguso assessed her life as a writer and mother with the greatest economy of means. In her latest, she goes a step further. "Think of this as a short book,” she advises, rather late in the book, “composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book's quotable passages." At first glance, it seems like a collection of off-kilter “Thoughts for the Day.” There are pithy aphorisms: "Inner beauty can fade, too"; dark, reflective thoughts: “Preferable to accepting one’s insignificance is imagining the others hate you”; purely personal confessions of sexual despair: “There are people I wanted so much before I had them that the entire experience of having them was grief for my old hunger.” These seemingly random and casual assertions subtly form a kind of loose story, that of a writer, academic, and mother at midlife wondering how the win-loss record might add up—and on which side this particular book might fall. “I’ve written whole books to avoid writing other books,” she confesses at one point, suggesting a failure of ambition. Some pages later she seems to feel at a loss: “I wish someone would tell me what I should be doing instead of this, that he’d be right, and that I’d believe him.” Self-doubt becomes part of a larger, more evocative struggle—to keep going, keep writing, and leave evidence of having lived: “On the page, these might look like the stones of a ruin, strewn by time and weather, but I was here.”
A slim, poetic self-portrait that opens up as you read it and stays in the mind.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-764-1
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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