A work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is “any revelation that...
A conceptually ambitious and assured debut, successfully bridging memoir and literary criticism.
Smyth, an American, first read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse when she was studying abroad at Oxford. She had been raised by her British father and Australian mother in their adopted New England, where the author harbored fantasies about their courtship and their charmed relationship. Smyth also had easy access to the sea, for which she felt an affinity that was reinforced by her favorite novel. As her parents’ marriage all but collapsed, complications challenged everything she once felt about life, and her life in particular, and she found refuge and resonance in Woolf’s famously challenging novel. Smyth, who has taught at Columbia and worked for the Paris Review, offers a close reading of that novel from the perspective of an obsessed reader who is both coming-of-age and coming to terms. Smyth’s memoir also serves as a biography of Woolf, particularly about the disappointments and epiphanies that the two share and that Woolf translated into her fiction. Most of all, the book is Smyth’s story of living with an alcoholic father through his protracted death, as he defied warnings that continuing to drink and smoke would kill him and then defied that predicted fate until he no longer could, at which point his death took everyone by surprise. The author writes of the vicious cycle perpetuated by her alcoholic father and clinically depressed mother, each blaming the other, becoming both more estranged and more inextricably bound together. She also writes of how she and her mother have grieved differently and how she may not be feeling what she should—whatever that is. Ultimately, she wonders whether any of this means anything: “Have I come up with anything, has Woolf come up with anything, that is more than merely circling a brutal truth?”
A work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is “any revelation that could lessen loss, that could help to make the fact of death okay.”Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6062-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
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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