Breezy reading that’s also a commentary on breezy reading. Some trick.
Knausgaard closes his quartet of autobiographical meditations on the seasons in an appropriately verdant and optimistic fashion.
The author likes a big finish: The concluding volume of his landmark My Struggle series cracked 1,100 pages, and this volume is substantially longer than its three predecessors (Autumn, 2017; Winter, 2018; Spring, 2018). As in Autumn and Winter, the book is rooted in brief essays contemplating and anthropomorphizing objects of everyday existence: slugs, tears, wasps, Sting CDs that reveal the chasm between “myself and the person I was thirty years ago.” The riffs are typically light, at times willfully frivolous (“has a single good author ever owned a dog?”), at others more thought-provoking and counterintuitive. Playgrounds, for instance, are imagination-stifling spaces “whose order and formulaic reason is a kind of bureaucratic utopia.” The book’s serious side—and much of its heft—is contained in lengthy diary entries in which Knausgaard contemplates his health, his children, his work, and especially his family history. Having recently observed a brain surgeon at work for a magazine story, the nature of consciousness is much on his mind (he’s reading a lot of Emanuel Swedenborg), and despite having written reams of prose that straddle the line between fiction and memoir, he’s still sorting out what defines such writing and how honest it can be. To get out of his own head, the author writes a fictionalization of the courtship between his grandparents after World War II, a story that turns out to be thick with lust, betrayal, and violence of Shakespearean proportions. “I am bad at writing imaginatively,” Knausgaard insists, but this is a bluff: He knows that while interrogating the nature of storytelling, he’s priming readers for a powerful, straightforward yarn.
Breezy reading that’s also a commentary on breezy reading. Some trick.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56339-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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