Father and son A memoir

The story starts with a stroke--headache, difficulty with balance, right-sided weakness--that occurred just before acclaimed writer Raban's sixty-ninth birthday. That was 12 years ago, and Raban passed away in 2023. This memoir, his final book, mixes the challenges of healing his damaged body, WWII history, and a biography of his dad. Raban remembers his childhood in England during the war, shares affectionate wartime letters penned by his parents to one another, and details his father's military service. He touchingly chronicles his transformation from healthy author to disabled patient. Recounting his nearly six-week stay in a neurological rehabilitation unit, Raban vividly describes the rehab staff, sights, sounds, and smells (including the odor of old people as that of "sweet-and-sour decomposition"). As he struggles to learn to walk again and master the art of transferring (from bed to wheelchair to toilet seat), he divulges a fear of falling. Raban illuminates the unpredictability of our memories. Frequently we invite them. Occasionally they just pop up. Sometimes we are helpless to suppress them.

This exceptional posthumous memoir from National Book Critics Circle Award winner Raban (Bad Land, 1942--2023) runs on two equally rewarding tracks. The first involves Raban's six-week stay at a rehabilitation facility following his sudden stroke in 2011; the second concerns his father's WWII correspondences with Raban's mother while he was at war in Italy and France and she remained in England. In the book's early sections, Raban delves into his parents' back-and-forth as he navigates endless days in the hospital, soothed by their fortitude in the face of even greater adversity. Drawing on the work of various historians, he places their letters in the war's chronological context, and finds himself growing emotionally closer to his father, with whom he barely had a relationship until he was in his 40s. Before long, a second father figure comes into focus: Tony Judt, whose 2006 book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 Raban reads "as a self-imposed course on intellectual rehabilitation... and a history of my (and my father's) lifetime on my own subcontinent," and whose Memory Chalet (in which Judt discusses his ALS-induced quadriplegia) Raban calls "one of the most engaging memoirs that I have ever read." Like Judt before him, Raban catalogs "the catastrophic progress of one's own deterioration" with warmth and intellectual rigor, effortlessly weaving together personal history and literary critique. Tirelessly researched and told with remarkable candor, this often breathtaking memoir is a worthy successor to Raban's hero's. (Sept.)

The late travel writer and playwright interweaves a tale of recovery from a stroke with wartime reminiscences of his father. Always a lucid, perceptive writer, Raban (1942-2023) sets out by reckoning that a life-transforming medical event was touched off by a lifetime of iffy habits: "Smoking was a key symptom of the life I'd led, my inhibited recklessness, my short horizons, my readiness to take risks without sufficient thought for the likely consequences." Pondering his friends who were also felled by smoking, his thoughts turn to his college-bound daughter and from her to his parents and a father he met only when he was 3 because of the intervention of World War II. Raban examines diaries, photo albums, and a trove of memories to piece together his father's wartime service, about which, in the manner of veterans of horrific combat, his father spoke very little. Evacuated at Dunkirk--a rescue operation somewhat less heroic than the "favorite trope for Conservative politicians" that it would become--the author's father went on to serve in North Africa, Italy, and Palestine, where he spent enough time patrolling the souks that he returned "a man who did his best to avoid all shops except tobacconists' and those that sold secondhand books." Reaching across the generations helped occupy Raban's mind in recovery, and his experiences as a patient will ring true to anyone who has spent significant time in the hospital. The author did get the approval of his doctor to have a little wine with his meals, whereupon friend Paul Theroux sent him half a case of pinot noir: "Sure that such a quantity of wine would be considered contraband here, I hid it as best I could behind the clothes in the closet." Happily, as Raban regained his health, he arrived at a more complete and understanding portrait of his parents and the privations of war. A touching farewell from a careful, thoughtful observer of life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.