A stirring, inventive masterpiece of heartbreak.
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A memoir of the author’s struggle to find the words to mourn her son’s death.
On March 16, 2015, Aidt’s son, Carl, died after throwing himself out of a fifth-floor window; he had suffered a psychotic break after consuming psilocybin mushrooms. It takes a long time—nearly halfway through this slim, devastating book—for Danish poet and fiction writer Aidt (Rock, Paper, Scissors, 2015, etc.) to state those facts so plainly. But her sense of grief is present from the first page, and she deploys multiple rhetorical elements—poetry, literary criticism, journals, all-caps, exclamatory text—to reckon with her loss. She returns over and over to her memory of the phone call delivering the news, adding new details each time, as if bracing herself to express the fullness of the event. Between those moments, Aidt bemoans the impossibility of putting her feelings into words through run-on anger (“I hate writing don’t want to write anymore I’m writing burning hate my anger is useless a howling cry”), unusually structured poetic passages (“Panic like a geyser inside the body / shoots its poison-water / up / from underground / to / the reptilian brain”), and sober contemplation of other grief-struck books such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and Anne Carson’s Nox. The difficulty of articulating grief is itself a cliché of the grief memoir, but Aidt’s shattering of genre forms both underscores the feeling of speechlessness and gives it a palpable shape. (The book’s orthography bolsters that sense, playing with font sizes, line breaks, and italicization; translator Newman handles these rhetorical shifts with grace and clarity.) Carl’s death thrusted Aidt into a world where “nothing resonates or can be established, where nothing in the entire world is recognizable.” Yet this book is an alchemical feat, giving shape to the most profound sense of absence.
A stirring, inventive masterpiece of heartbreak.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-56689-560-6
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | PSYCHOLOGY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
17
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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