Although sometimes maddening to read, Lemon’s collision of ideas and images adds up to a celebration of a life unbowed by...
Fevered prose and wild digressions mark a poet’s candid memoir of pain and illness.
In 1999, when he was 21, Lemon (English/Texas Christian Univ.; The Wish Book: Poems, 2014, etc.) underwent surgery because of a bleeding vascular malformation in his brain stem, a procedure that caused severe debilities. “Medical clinics and hospitals have become a second home,” he writes, as he seeks diagnosis and treatment for a host of problems: painful swallowing, facial numbness, tremors, leg and back cramps, paresthesia, chronic constipation, ulcerated mouth sores, double vision, panic attacks, depression, insomnia, and exhaustion. “Always,” he writes, “it seems that I’m waiting for the results of a procedure that will tell me how close I am to death.” Added to this list is psychological trauma from having been sexually abused, when was 3, by a cousin who threatened to kill his family if he told anyone. At the time, Lemon writes, he wasn’t sure what was happening or whether it was “really bad. Maybe I deserve it,” he thought. “Maybe a part of me likes it.” Yet since then, he has been burdened by the effects of his cousin’s repeated cruelty. He learns that such trauma cuts the victim off from experiencing sensations and emotions that could be overwhelming, and he struggles, he writes, “to recalibrate my ‘felt sense.’ ” Lemon’s kaleidoscopic, occasionally scattershot chapters offer a collage of dreams, hallucinations, childhood memories, anecdotes about his wife and young son, references to literature, art, and popular culture, and, of course, the state of his body and mind. “Like So Many Nightmares,” for example, begins with his reading Rilke at daybreak and then segues into Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, Freud, Jung, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and anti-war protests in Minneapolis in 2003. “Knowledge is everywhere in the coming daylight,” he reflects, as his mind swerves and swirls through “an emporium of collisions and adoration” that illuminates for him the miracle of survival.
Although sometimes maddening to read, Lemon’s collision of ideas and images adds up to a celebration of a life unbowed by suffering.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57131-336-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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