Americans accustomed to the histrionic self-display of celebrity memoirs and the self-involved, studied impressionism of writers' self-portraits are likely to find Nobel laureate Mahfouz's fragmentary approach to autobiography charmingly novel. In fact, Mahfouz's volume would be unrecognizable as autobiography to Western readers if it weren't for its title. Instead of presenting a straightforward narrative about his family in Cairo, his philosophical studies, his career in the civil service, and his 34 novels (Children of the Alley, 1996, etc.), Mahfouz collects 200 terse memories, parables, fictions, and fugitive moments, some narrated in the first person, some in the third, most no more than a few sentences long. Many of them read like distillations of the longer fables in Arabian Nights and Days (1995). A nine-month-old fetus worries about the dim prospect of an afterlife. A billiard player, refusing a game, says he prefers to play alone as others watch him, even though everyone else in the parlor is asleep. A man bothered by a commotion in the street stops trying to quiet the carousers when he suddenly sees them "in God's good time, as they hurried toward the grave." An old man and his wife recall how "they were brought together by love 30 years ago, then it had abandoned them along with the rest of their expectations." The majority of the characters here pass briefly and are gone, hustling off on their errands. Only one figure abides: Sheik Abd-Rabih al Ta'ih, whose Sufi-tinged apothegms on time and age, the ripeness of memory, the everlasting pursuit of love, and the shaping forces of death and faith ("There is no one more foolish than the foolish believer, except for the foolish unbeliever") dominate the last third of the book. Readers looking for conventional revelations about the famously reticent Mahfouz will come away disappointed. For those more patient, the novelist offers a haunting commonplace book of tranquil wisdom.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48555-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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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