Category: death-and-dying
- Two People TalkingDrive My Car a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With Hidetosha Nishijima, Toko, Miura, Reika Kirishima, Park YuRim. Streaming on HBO Max. ***** Drive My Car is so fundamentally strange a movie that it’s hard to know how to talk about it. The full credits, for instance, don’t appear until forty minutes in. There are still two ...Read more
- Comedy as TragedyDon’t Look Up a film by Adam McKay. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett. ***** Don’t Look Up is a comic masterpiece, the Dr. Strangelove of our time. It holds a mirror up to this country and captures it exactly. You watch this movie and laugh until you cry. Then you just cry. ...Read more
- Faulkner at his Knottiest(The Faulkner Project) Go Down, Moses from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 1-281 ***** I had an odd thought when I began this novel, the thirteenth in my survey of Faulkner’s work: This is the real Faulkner. It’s a strange thing to say about a man who had already written four or five masterpieces, ...Read more
- Man on the MoonRobert McCutcheon 1921-2021 The thing I will most remember about my Uncle Bob is the way he took care of my mother—his sister—when she had dementia. Her second husband, my stepfather, had died just before she turned 90, and it took some time for us to realize that he had been her memory in recent years ...Read more
- I Bow BackWhen You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer. Shambhala. 336 pp. $16.97. ***** I haven’t read all his books, but for my money this is Norman Fischer’s best, reflections on a wide range of topics from a man who has spent fifty years living and teaching the ...Read more
- Name Droppers ExtraordinaireInside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis. Knopf. 545 pp. $28.82 Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien. Little, Brown. 368 pp. $27.94. Inside Story is a novel because Martin Amis chooses to call it one. It has novelistic sections, but the bulk of the book is a memoir of some writers who have been his good ...Read more
- She Doesn’t Give a Rat’s AssI Care a Lot a film by J Blakeson. With Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eliza Gonzalez, Diane Wiest. Streaming on Netflix. ***** I Care a Lot—a comedy—is the most morally despicable movie I’ve seen in years. The female protagonists are the most hateful characters I can recall in a film. It includes stomach-churning violence, has any ...Read more
- Hem IIIHemingway | The Blank Page | 1944-1961 a film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick. Streaming on PBS **** The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926 by Ernest Hemingway. Library of America. 850 pp. ***** There’s nothing about the writing or production values that makes this third episode of Hemingway not as good as the others, ...Read more
- Hem IIHemingway: The Avatar (1929-1944) A film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick. Available on PBS Streaming. ***** Once again, in this second episode, I was stuck by Hemingway’s youth (he was already calling himself Papa in 1929, at the age of thirty). By the end of this episode he’s just 45 years old, and he’s already ...Read more
- Portrait of a Lunatic (You Wrote About the Wrong Cousin, Iris Murdoch)The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Classics. 495 pp. $20.00 ***** The Sea, the Sea has everything going for it. It’s large and expansive, beautifully written; it contains a wealth of fascinating characters; it traces a wild plot, where things keep happening that you can’t believe, and it comes to an emotionally satisfying confusion. ...Read more
- Ode to SwimmingGet Back to Where You Once Belonged Yesterday I swam for the first time in over a year. Since 1985—that’s 35 years—I’d gone swimming at the Y three times a week. I’d been a jogger before that, but the North Carolina heat and my aching joints made me turn to swimming at the age of 37. I’d ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artists Through a Boozy HazeEarly Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Library of America. 970 pp. In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book), ...Read more
- And Talk They DidLet Them All Talk a film by Steven Soderbergh. With Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, Gemma Chan, Lucas Hedges. Available on HBO Plus. ***** At one point in Let Them All Talk, a movie about three old college friends who do a crossing on the Queen Mary 2, Susan (Dianne Wiest) stops an awkward conversation ...Read more
- The Height of her PowersThe Friend a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $10.39. I don’t know how Sigrid Nunez does it. She seems to begin her novels any old place, with whatever event comes to mind, and moves on from there. She doesn’t tell stories chronologically or in any particular way, but they fall right into place. ...Read more
- That’s Not the ChoiceReflections on The Friend In Sigrid Nunez’ superb novel The Friend, the narrator is thinking back on a friend who has just died, and mentions that he was a committed atheist. “Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.” I almost jumped out of my chair as I read that. That’s not the ...Read more
- Oh Susie QSempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 128 pp. $16.00. ***** I always thought of Susan Sontag as the most fearsome intellectual in America, if not on the face of the earth. With that wild shock of dark hair with its gray streak, she wrote books on a wide variety of ...Read more
- What Finally MattersWhat Are You Going Through: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $19.59. ***** The idea sounds grim beyond belief. Our narrator—living in New York—has a friend in a nearby town who is dying of cancer. At first the woman seems to be in remission, but then the cancer comes back with a vengeance, ...Read more
- Invitation to Die ForThe White House Super Spreader Please Be Warned: This is a Rant. Usually I have better control of myself, but sometimes things get to be a little too much. This nomination was cursed from the start. I don’t mean that Justice Amy Coney (“Grin And”) Barrett won’t sail through the Senate and be confirmed as the next justice ...Read more
- And Another ThingMy First Shrink II The most valuable thing my first therapist did for me was to suggest I could rearrange my life to do the thing I loved, that I didn’t have to stay in a job just because I was good at it or because it seemed safe. I could completely upend my life. It ...Read more
- What Healing IsFor My 72nd Birthday The morning my father died we had barely gotten back from the hospital when there was a knock at the door and my mother opened it to Mrs. Shriver, a neighbor from across the street. She was an older woman, with a ruddy, deeply lined face, kept herself busy with outdoor sports, ...Read more
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And Is He PissedLooks Pretty Good to MeShe Wasn’t Crazy. The World Was.Elmore the GreatWriting Like God
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (213)art (112)Buddhism (167)Christianity (124)creative process (244)death and dying (137)meditation (122)movies (158)music (36)race (104)religion (185)sex (167)spirituality (170)the art of narrative (251)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)