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delore's review
3.0
7/10
Harold Brodkey died on this day 25 years ago.
It is by some strange coincidence that I finish his last statement to the world on this same day. A truly haunting and painfully honest book. It feels like Brodkey truly comes alive out of the page as he struggles toward his inevitable and devastating end. He illuminates the road toward death in a breathtakingly harsh but brilliant light: it’s at times heartbreaking; it’s at times funny; it’s at times unspeakably desolate. Reality melts into dream as waking hours fall into an endless sleep. As my grandfather begins this same grim journey, This Wild Darkness came to me at a time when I really needed it.
RIP Harold Brodkey
Harold Brodkey died on this day 25 years ago.
It is by some strange coincidence that I finish his last statement to the world on this same day. A truly haunting and painfully honest book. It feels like Brodkey truly comes alive out of the page as he struggles toward his inevitable and devastating end. He illuminates the road toward death in a breathtakingly harsh but brilliant light: it’s at times heartbreaking; it’s at times funny; it’s at times unspeakably desolate. Reality melts into dream as waking hours fall into an endless sleep. As my grandfather begins this same grim journey, This Wild Darkness came to me at a time when I really needed it.
RIP Harold Brodkey
expendablemudge's review
2.0
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: It is possible not to care for Harold Brodkey's obsessive, digressive, almost plotless fiction and still be moved by this memoir of his last sufferings until his death, in mid-1996, of AIDS. Brodkey was a writer for whom style was everything, but in his own implacable and untimely mortality he found a subject before which style was nothing. In this assemblage of essays, journal entries, and brief notes, he confronts his illness from a clinical perspective without losing his ironic tone or his genius for minutiae. In a sense, Brodkey wrote nothing but autobiography throughout his career; this, then, is a fitting final chapter.
My Review: Fabulous language, gorgeous emotional honesty, and why in the end do I care so little? His wife seems to me a woman who made a bad bargain and stuck with it; he seems self aware and unblinkingly honest about his fate, but some essential something that would give this book its heart wasn't put into it. I suppose it could be the supre-tight focus on Brodkey's death and death alone that makes me feel somehow bereft of personal feeling. Perhaps I feel slightly uninterested because I know so little of the man himself before the illness. I can't really be certain, since my editorial sense deserted me as I read this book. I fell into a fogged unwillingness to read or stop reading, a very unusual state for me. A very strange book.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Publisher Says: It is possible not to care for Harold Brodkey's obsessive, digressive, almost plotless fiction and still be moved by this memoir of his last sufferings until his death, in mid-1996, of AIDS. Brodkey was a writer for whom style was everything, but in his own implacable and untimely mortality he found a subject before which style was nothing. In this assemblage of essays, journal entries, and brief notes, he confronts his illness from a clinical perspective without losing his ironic tone or his genius for minutiae. In a sense, Brodkey wrote nothing but autobiography throughout his career; this, then, is a fitting final chapter.
My Review: Fabulous language, gorgeous emotional honesty, and why in the end do I care so little? His wife seems to me a woman who made a bad bargain and stuck with it; he seems self aware and unblinkingly honest about his fate, but some essential something that would give this book its heart wasn't put into it. I suppose it could be the supre-tight focus on Brodkey's death and death alone that makes me feel somehow bereft of personal feeling. Perhaps I feel slightly uninterested because I know so little of the man himself before the illness. I can't really be certain, since my editorial sense deserted me as I read this book. I fell into a fogged unwillingness to read or stop reading, a very unusual state for me. A very strange book.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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