The text is elegantly translated by McLean, and García Márquez fans will welcome these fresh and lively examples of his...
An eye-opening collection of articles that reveal Gabo the journalist.
New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson sets up this eclectic and transportive selection of 50 journalistic pieces from 1950 to 1984 by the Colombian Nobel laureate, noting in his introduction that journalism was García Márquez’s “first true love.” In fact, the beloved novelist (1927-2014) called it the “best profession in the world.” Editor Pera confesses that he purposefully chose pieces that “contain a latent narrative tension between journalism and literature” to showcase the author’s “unstoppable narrative impulse.” The titular article, the longest in the collection, written for El Spectador, which published García Márquez’s first short stories, is an account of the mysterious death of a young Italian woman in Rome in 1953. The atmospheric, serialized piece is told in chapter form and might owe something to García Márquez’s love of two “perfect” short stories he references in “Like Souls in Purgatory”: W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” and Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Many of the articles confront political and social issues, including the U.S. blockade of Cuba, the Sandinista raid in Managua, Nicaragua, the international trafficking of women, the death of his beloved Magdalena River from pollution and deforestation, and the Soviet intervention in Hungary. In “Misadventures of a Writer of Books,” García Márquez admits that a writer “has no other revolutionary obligation than to write well.” He rages about bad teachers of literature who “spout nonsense,” calls the Nobel Prize a “senile laurel,” is convinced “Japanese novels have something in common with mine,” praises “self-sacrificing” translators as “brilliant accomplice[s],” and mourns the death of John Lennon. In the lovely “My Personal Hemingway,” García Márquez recalls seeing him across a Paris street in 1957 and shouting out, “Maaeeestro!”
The text is elegantly translated by McLean, and García Márquez fans will welcome these fresh and lively examples of his beautiful, lyrical writing.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65642-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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