A review by kylegarvey
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

sad medium-paced

2.0

Very sad, almost too sad, but what's sadder than mortality really and isn't that the saddest thing ever and how could you be sadder. The author was this prestigious surgeon -- and you could just end the book there pretty much and have it be a not terrible memoir, stress of med school, relentless life angst, reflecting on medicine's philosophy quite profoundly -- but on to death we go. He has cancer this surgeon, you know, and succumbs to what's inevitable. A tragedy befalling all us mortals. I am serious. A plain tragedy. Plain tragedy. The whole book's sorta like Gomes's 2012 Brazilian film ONCE UPON A TIME VERONICA maybe? in parts? 

 

He puts on himself huge tasks. "When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool" (90) and "But the skull wasn’t going to close itself. There would be time for speculation tomorrow" (110) and "I recalled Henry Adams trying to compare the scientific force of the combustion engine and the existential force of the Virgin Mary. The scientific questions were settled for now, allowing the existential ones full play, yet" (146) and it falls anyway -- but I'm probably citing things weird. 

 

I definitely have my nits to pick. "The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning" (156) -- a problem for you, maybe, but a problem in general? And then "No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience" (157) -- except yours, we presume. But picking nits here seems very inappropriate. Lol (lots of love). 

 

There's an afterword written by the wife. To be frank, she lands in many of the cliché traps he avoided, so I know why she didn't write the whole thing; plain B- prose can make you really glad you'd gotten so much B+, A-, A work. Dude. The "version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version with whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year, the Paul who wrote this book—frail but never weak" (197) is a heck of a 'About the author, your late author', huh?