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jennifer's reviews
173 reviews
The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries by Jessa Crispin
5.0
On the surface, The Dead Ladies Project and Eat, Pray, Love have a lot in common. Both start with an author in crisis—Elizabeth Gilbert on the brink of divorce, Jessa Crispin on the brink of suicide. Both authors respond to their crisis by taking A Big Trip. Gilbert hits Italy, then India and Bali where she eventually snags the man who became her second husband. Crispin elects to stay in Europe, spending extended periods in places that have links to artists who are often but not always women that history has unfairly forgotten and all the while agonizing over her lover, a married man back home.
As she travels around Europe, Cripsin introduces us to women like Nora Barnacle, who was James Joyce's wife, and Margaret Anderson, who was the woman responsible for introducing Joyce to America via her groundbreaking literary mag. Never heard of them? Neither had I. Most striking is the story of Claude Cahun, a lesbian who ran away to Paris with her lover (and stepsister) and hung out with the Surrealists before moving to Jersey and spearheading a subtle letter-writing campaign to undermine the Nazi occupation. In contrast, from memory, the most interesting person Gilbert meets is a guy from Texas doing yoga in India.
This is not to disparage Eat, Pray, Love. I read it and everything else Gilbert wrote after. Sometimes you crave the "be your best self" stuff delivered by someone who's Oprah's BFF. But sometimes you need something grittier and here Crispin delivers. She's decidedly not trying to be her best self but rather just herself, which is a merciful relief to her readers.
As she travels around Europe, Cripsin introduces us to women like Nora Barnacle, who was James Joyce's wife, and Margaret Anderson, who was the woman responsible for introducing Joyce to America via her groundbreaking literary mag. Never heard of them? Neither had I. Most striking is the story of Claude Cahun, a lesbian who ran away to Paris with her lover (and stepsister) and hung out with the Surrealists before moving to Jersey and spearheading a subtle letter-writing campaign to undermine the Nazi occupation. In contrast, from memory, the most interesting person Gilbert meets is a guy from Texas doing yoga in India.
This is not to disparage Eat, Pray, Love. I read it and everything else Gilbert wrote after. Sometimes you crave the "be your best self" stuff delivered by someone who's Oprah's BFF. But sometimes you need something grittier and here Crispin delivers. She's decidedly not trying to be her best self but rather just herself, which is a merciful relief to her readers.
The Course of Love by Alain de Botton
3.0
Billed as Alain de Botton's first new novel in over 20 years, The Course of Love is largely a typical de Botton non-fiction work, this time on the subject of marriage, with a story of a married couple living in Edinburgh thrown in to illustrate his points. The non-fiction part is presented in constant interjections to the plot via italicized commentary, making Botton guilty of the writing sin of telling rather than showing. That I agreed with his points and occasionally felt validated helped.
In the end, nobody can say the author didn't warn us: the word "course" is in the title, and the book sometimes feels like taking one. Luckily, I'm the kind of person who would sign up for a class at de Botton's School of Life, so I didn't mind much.
In the end, nobody can say the author didn't warn us: the word "course" is in the title, and the book sometimes feels like taking one. Luckily, I'm the kind of person who would sign up for a class at de Botton's School of Life, so I didn't mind much.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
5.0
I read this book because I've been thinking a lot about what work I want to do, and frankly I hoped an extraordinarily smart, relatively young man who was facing down his own death might have some advice. As it happens, Kalanithi made it clear his intentions aligned with my needs when he quoted from Montaigne at the beginning of Part II of this memoir: "he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live."
From the start of the book, it's clear that Kalanithi is operating on a different plane of intelligence and achievement than most of us mere mortals. After graduating from Stanford with degrees in English literature and human biology, he dashed off to Cambridge University to complete a degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine—a year he flies through in a single paragraph—before heading to med school at Yale. As he nears graduation from Yale, Kalanithi comments disapprovingly about some fellow medical students who wanted to remove the language about placing patients' interest above their own from their commencement oath: "This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that's the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job-not a calling."
Towards the end of the book, after he's been diagnosed with lung cancer but is still finishing his residency, Kalanithi describes some tasks he needs to finish: "I had to go see patients, organize, tomorrow's OR schedule, review films, dictate my clinic notes, check on my post-ops, and so on." I was so conditioned to Kalanithi's over-achievement at this point that I assumed he had somehow, shockingly, found time to be review movies while undergoing cancer treatment and completing his residency. It took me a second to realize he was talking about the type of films that radiologists read, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he was moonlighting as a culture critic for The New York Times.
This is a man who held extraordinary standards for himself and yet, mercifully, he also had a sense of humor. Describing his experience with cadaver dissection in medical school, he says this: "Everything teeters between pathos and bathos. Here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos, and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito."
And while there is an awful lot of utterly admirable striving in Kalanithi's life—which is certainly a kick in the pants for those of us, like me, who have been a bit lazy about matters such as the work we do in this world—in the end it’s his humanity and humor that shine through. His extraordinary curiosity, and the follow-through on that curiosity is also an example worth emulating.
As he gets sicker, he comments about the difficulty of deciding on which burning curiosity to follow in his remaining precious time: "The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with a terminal illness is a process." This passage summed up for me the lasting message of the book: for those of us who have more time, life is just a longer version of this process and it matters that we keep figuring out what matters to us and acting accordingly.
From the start of the book, it's clear that Kalanithi is operating on a different plane of intelligence and achievement than most of us mere mortals. After graduating from Stanford with degrees in English literature and human biology, he dashed off to Cambridge University to complete a degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine—a year he flies through in a single paragraph—before heading to med school at Yale. As he nears graduation from Yale, Kalanithi comments disapprovingly about some fellow medical students who wanted to remove the language about placing patients' interest above their own from their commencement oath: "This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that's the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job-not a calling."
Towards the end of the book, after he's been diagnosed with lung cancer but is still finishing his residency, Kalanithi describes some tasks he needs to finish: "I had to go see patients, organize, tomorrow's OR schedule, review films, dictate my clinic notes, check on my post-ops, and so on." I was so conditioned to Kalanithi's over-achievement at this point that I assumed he had somehow, shockingly, found time to be review movies while undergoing cancer treatment and completing his residency. It took me a second to realize he was talking about the type of films that radiologists read, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he was moonlighting as a culture critic for The New York Times.
This is a man who held extraordinary standards for himself and yet, mercifully, he also had a sense of humor. Describing his experience with cadaver dissection in medical school, he says this: "Everything teeters between pathos and bathos. Here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos, and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito."
And while there is an awful lot of utterly admirable striving in Kalanithi's life—which is certainly a kick in the pants for those of us, like me, who have been a bit lazy about matters such as the work we do in this world—in the end it’s his humanity and humor that shine through. His extraordinary curiosity, and the follow-through on that curiosity is also an example worth emulating.
As he gets sicker, he comments about the difficulty of deciding on which burning curiosity to follow in his remaining precious time: "The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with a terminal illness is a process." This passage summed up for me the lasting message of the book: for those of us who have more time, life is just a longer version of this process and it matters that we keep figuring out what matters to us and acting accordingly.
Loitering: New & Collected Essays by Charles D'Ambrosio
4.0
Thinking back over this far-ranging collection of essays, one common thread is how often I had to use the dictionary function on my Kindle to look up a word. I mention this not because it bothers me but because it says something about the kind of intentional writer D'Ambrosio is.
In his preface, D'Ambrosio makes clear writing is serious business for him, describing his stubbornness—"I wrote the earliest of these essays for The Stranger...because no one else would give me five thousand words and then agree not change a single comma"—and his dedication—"I worked on each of these pieces a stupidly long time." I get the sense that each word that could be perceived as highfalutin was a considered choice, and D'Ambrosio believed he was following Orwell's advice to "never use a long word when a short one will do." Rather than turn me off, this style made me feel like I was in good hands. In this political season it is akin to my belief that I want the person serving as President to be smarter than I am.
Truth be told, I didn't finish all the essays in the book. In Part 3: Reading Life, I gave up on both Salinger and Sobs and Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg, both of which felt too ponderous for my mood. But for me the whole book was worth reading for the short masterpiece that appears in Part 1: West of the West, Catching Out. This is Living, Orphans, and Misreading were also standouts.
In his preface, D'Ambrosio makes clear writing is serious business for him, describing his stubbornness—"I wrote the earliest of these essays for The Stranger...because no one else would give me five thousand words and then agree not change a single comma"—and his dedication—"I worked on each of these pieces a stupidly long time." I get the sense that each word that could be perceived as highfalutin was a considered choice, and D'Ambrosio believed he was following Orwell's advice to "never use a long word when a short one will do." Rather than turn me off, this style made me feel like I was in good hands. In this political season it is akin to my belief that I want the person serving as President to be smarter than I am.
Truth be told, I didn't finish all the essays in the book. In Part 3: Reading Life, I gave up on both Salinger and Sobs and Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg, both of which felt too ponderous for my mood. But for me the whole book was worth reading for the short masterpiece that appears in Part 1: West of the West, Catching Out. This is Living, Orphans, and Misreading were also standouts.
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
4.0
I should have loved this, being one of those Joan Didonesque, disconnected-lone-female type novels (and set in Paris no less). That sensation was evoked to great effect in recent books like Outline and Pond, but here Rhys' protagonist, Sasha, does my head in a bit. To be fair, she is a victim of her time—the book is set just before WWII and was published in 1939—and I have been influenced by Jessa Crispin's less than charitable take on Rhys in Crispin's book, The Dead Ladies Project.
In any case, this is a slip of a book and hard to regret reading given the gems that appear in its pages, like the anecdote about a bald, dying woman who comes into a dress shop where Sasha works and wants "something to wear in my hair in the evening." She tries combs and flowers and feathers but leaves without buying anything in the end, chastised by her mortified daughter for being "silly." After they go, Sasha despairs, "Oh, but why not buy her a wig, several decent dresses, as much champagne as she can drink, all the things she likes to eat and oughtn't to, a gigolo if she wants one. One last flare-up and she'll be dead in six months at the outside. That's all you're waiting for, isn't it? But no, you must have the slow death, the bloodless killing that leaves no stain on your conscience..."
Despite its occasional tendency to grate, it is, in the end, a book of great humanity.
In any case, this is a slip of a book and hard to regret reading given the gems that appear in its pages, like the anecdote about a bald, dying woman who comes into a dress shop where Sasha works and wants "something to wear in my hair in the evening." She tries combs and flowers and feathers but leaves without buying anything in the end, chastised by her mortified daughter for being "silly." After they go, Sasha despairs, "Oh, but why not buy her a wig, several decent dresses, as much champagne as she can drink, all the things she likes to eat and oughtn't to, a gigolo if she wants one. One last flare-up and she'll be dead in six months at the outside. That's all you're waiting for, isn't it? But no, you must have the slow death, the bloodless killing that leaves no stain on your conscience..."
Despite its occasional tendency to grate, it is, in the end, a book of great humanity.
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
5.0
In Stasiland, Anna Funder, an Australian who lived and worked in Berlin, unpacks the Berlin Wall and life under the Stasi in the GDR in a way that all my visits to memorials and museums in this city never did. The core of the book is a collection of stories of East Germans, some with a personal connection to Funder (her landlady), others found through her research, including a newspaper ad she placed looking to speak with former Stasi employees. Ultimately it's their stories that make the book, but Funder's writing is also tremendous. She injects just enough of herself so that she's not the main story but is still a relatable, empathetic witness. Highly recommended reading for anyone visiting Berlin or interested in this period of history.