The deceptively effortless translation by Stein renders this a treasure at once absurd and heartbreaking.
A skillful blurring of art and reality is achieved in French author Bouillier’s beguilingly spare “account” of recovery from a romantic heartbreak.
A sudden call from a lover who left him abruptly years before lurches the narrator of this fiction-cum-memoir from a state of cold paralysis into preparation for battle. The vanished girlfriend resurfaces to invite the narrator to the birthday party of her husband’s best friend, artist Sophie Calle, who always invites a “mystery guest” to represent the year to come, and which the narrator has been designated. This blast from the past strikes the still emotionally raw narrator, caught napping and vulnerable in the afternoon, as a way to finally “cut the leash” that tied him to the former girlfriend’s inexplicable vanishing—and achieve at last a sense of redemption. The weeks before the big night plunge the narrator back into the hellish despair of having to think about the former lover constantly, conveyed in self-aggrandizing, hilarious reflections on matters such as the ridiculous turtlenecks he has taken to wearing as a kind of Band-Aid. He obsesses over signs of fate, coincidences, “a force seeking some means of self-expression,” such as the orbiting of the Ulysses space probe, in order to make sense of the former girlfriend’s reappearance in his life. Determined not to be the laughingstock of the party, he decides on the perfect gift to bring: a bottle of vintage Margaux well beyond his means. And on the night of Reckoning, when he nervously, warily presents himself, his now-married and very lovely former girlfriend informs him that the hostess, Sophie, never opens her presents, rather she displays them. In fact, meeting the girlfriend again does not elucidate anything for the narrator except in her whispered parting words about the bouquet of cut roses—straight from Mrs. Dalloway—which then lifts his battered heart into the divine, redemptive realm of literature.
The deceptively effortless translation by Stein renders this a treasure at once absurd and heartbreaking.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-18570-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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