Manguso is an intriguing, talented writer, but this book is missing something vital. It has the weight of the author’s loss...
How does the suicide of a friend affect someone who has come perilously close to suicide herself?
That’s the question Manguso (The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir, 2008, etc.) wrestles with in this purgative memoir. The friend was Harris, a brilliant but troubled musician who escaped from a psychiatric ward in 2008 and threw himself in front of an oncoming train. No stranger to depression herself, Manguso attempts to figure out her friend’s motivation. Was it a reaction to an antipsychotic drug known to make patients maddeningly restless? How did he leave the facility so easily? Could she have saved him? What if she had married him? Could he have lived a happy life, or would it always have been one of “unendurable suffering”? As in The Two Kinds of Decay, which recalled her own debilitating struggle with a rare illness, Manguso is adept at breaking her memories into small, vivid pieces. She scrutinizes everything from the language of death to her own close relationship to it: “I say I’m interested in life, but really I want to play a little game with Death. I want to lie down next to him and smell his infected breath.” The author displays brave writing throughout, but she is also self-absorbed. She is so fascinated and fixated on trying to palpate the contours of her own grief that the subject gets lost. Who is Harris? Ultimately, this so-called elegy is more about the author than the subject.
Manguso is an intriguing, talented writer, but this book is missing something vital. It has the weight of the author’s loss without the weight of her experience.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-16724-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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