Saving face, face value, and putting on a brave face will all resonate differently with readers of this quirky,...
Three titles inaugurate a new series of short paperbacks offering meditations on the author’s face.
The series was inspired by a passage from Jorge Luis Borges, whose parable finds a man establishing his own world “with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” These three book-length essays examine the face as bloodline and lineage, as a mask as permeable as identity. Each is a memoir of sorts, though more of a metaphysical illumination in the case of Ozeki (A Tale for the Time-Being, 2013, etc.), a novelist who is also ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest. Hers, titled A Time Code, is the first and longest and is structured as a three-hour meditation of the author looking in the mirror and recording the ruminations that her reflection conjures. Connecting with the inspiration of Borges, she begins with the Zen koan, “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” Her face reflects her parentage, as the daughter of an American professor and the Japanese woman with whom he fell in love so shortly after the nations had been enemies. Ozeki remembers her face in girlhood and now contemplates it on the cusp of 60, concluding, “my face is and isn’t me. It’s a nice face. It has lots of people in it.” In Cartography of the Void, Abani (The Secret History of Las Vegas, 2014, etc.) also comes to terms with his mixed parentage—white mother and West African father—as he attempts to resolve his ambivalence toward the latter, whose face is now his. With Strangers on a Pier, Aw offers the most straightforward account—and the one least focused on “the face”—of the immigrant family’s experience as their son was raised in “a traditional Chinese family” before he moved to Britain for an education that launched a literary career (Five Star Billionaire, 2013, etc.).
Saving face, face value, and putting on a brave face will all resonate differently with readers of this quirky, philosophical series.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63206-052-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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