The Russian Nobel laureate speaks his mind on poetry, other poets, and his life in conversations with another intellectual Russian ÇmigrÇ. In his preface, Volkov (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, 1995, etc.) suggests that his reader regard these conversations with Brodsky ``as a guide, a kind of Baedeker, to the breathtaking, often beautiful, and at times forbidding territory of Brodsky's life and art.'' It is a bad start. This kind of blurb-speak immediately sets the teeth on edge, and the pages that follow do not bear out Volkov's exaggerated claim. Little bears directly on Brodsky's art. But we do hear Brodsky talking about his life (arrest, trial) under the Soviet regime and then his life in exile in the US. And he talks a good deal about the art of other writers, in particular Marina Tsvetaeva (his favorite candidate for great poet of the century), Anna Akhmatova (``she set our souls in motion''), W.H. Auden (an aphoristic thinker), and Robert Frost (the great poet of horror). As we might expect, Brodsky has various interesting things to say about poets and poetry. Unfortunately, Volkov's freewheeling conversations do not probe deeply. Volkov, as rough-and-ready a talker as the great poet, encourages him to roam extravagantly in his literary chitchat, which means that he fails in his task as an interviewer. He doesn't always press the poet into greater precision and fuller depth. Still, you cannot go terribly wrong with Brodsky as your partner in conversation. There is much of interest here. Though this is not so lean and pithy as the general reader may wish, students of poetry will find Volkov's book suggestive. And as for the autobiographical material it makes available, Brodsky offers a caveat: ``There is nothing duller than to look at an artist's work as the result of his life.'' (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83572-X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
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
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