This Wild Darkness: The Story of my Death [Paperback]

Harold Brodkey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1997

A New York Times Noteworthy Paperback, 1997

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"This is how my life ended. And how my dying began." So wrote Brodkey, a novelist (The Runaway Soul) and short-story writer, after he was diagnosed with AIDS in the spring of 1993. He died in the fall of 1995, at the age of 65. Parts of this record of those last years were published in the New Yorker while he was still alive, against the advice of his doctor, who believed that people who keep their disease secret often live longer. But Brodkey could not stand the pretense (or "lies," as he calls it) of keeping silent. The result is, in effect, the last words of a skillful writer who was fully prepared to be entertained?or at least instructed?by his own death. Set in Manhattan, Venice and the northern Catskill Mountains, the memoir combines autobiography (a St. Louis childhood, earlier brushes with death, sexual abuse by his stepfather, homosexual love affairs) with reports on the progress of the disease and thoughts on subjects that range from optimism, sexual myth and the American cult of male irresponsibility to the joy of escaping into dreams and a newly discovered delight?mixed with terror over the possible danger?in kissing his wife. Accepting illness, he learns, is more difficult than accepting death. Toward the end, Brodkey writes: "I had expected death to glimmer with meaning, but it doesn't. It's just there." It's "boring." Readers of this remarkable record may be repelled or moved or fascinated, but few will be bored.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (October 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805055118
• ISBN-13: 978-0805055115
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,317,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Achievement enough, March 12, 2002

By 

Eric Krupin (Salt Lake City, UT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: This Wild Darkness: The Story of my Death (Paperback)

Sitting in the office of an English professor whose opinions I respect, I noticed he had Harold Brodkey's chef d'oeuvre - the 30 years in the writing "The Runaway Soul" - wedged in his crowded shelves. Remembering how my initial fascination with that novel was drowned by the bewildering and ultimately awful *too-muchness* of that book, I asked the professor what he made of Brodkey. "He's insane, of course," was the ready reply.

Well, that might be oversimplifying the matter, but on re-reading "This Wild Darkness" recently, I decided that, for all its occasional brilliance in describing what it feels like to be inside a dying body, the professor's comment tells more of the story than it might seem at first glance - enough certainly for anyone who approaches Brodkey with a not unreasonable degree of skepticism. All too often, the author's observations about others and - his great subject - himself, have a strong whiff of delusional unreality about them. When he says that his "irresistability" as a young man was such that it led to people trying to abduct him, I simply don't believe him. The great James Salter, in his own memoir, remembers the younger, on-the-make, Brodkey-in-the-Sixties as a "troublemaker" and that sounds convincingly right.

And yet Brodkey must have had something going for him all those years when he managed to convince a few influential tastemakers that he was an unheralded genius and I believe he did. His mature style - a heterogenous mix of colloquial intimacy and ambitious abstraction - was truly unique and, at its occasional best, as surpassingly expressive as his literary padrones claimed. "This Wild Darkness", composed during a terminal illness, understandably does not represent this style at its highest pitch but it is still something that absolutely no one else could have written. That just might be achievement enough.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a typical memoir about dying., August 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: This Wild Darkness: The Story of my Death (Paperback)

Harold Brodkey admits that he is not an easy person to like. It also appears that it was not easy for him to live inside his own skin. But during the three years that he lived with the knowledge that he would die from AIDS, he strove to look, unflichingly, into the face of death. Like the rest of us, he could not always endure the truth. He did, however, write a report from the land of the terminally ill that is unsentimental and painful, with occasional flashes of illumination.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We're all human, after all., May 17, 1998

By 

Kristin Summerlin (Two Rivers, AK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (Hardcover)

And Brodkey's humanity shines foremost in this simple book. Knocked off-balance by his diagnosis, Brodkey uses words to find his way through the "death experience." Sometimes tongue-in-cheek, more often matter-of-fact, Brodkey examines his impending death as he lives it. Without excessive sentimentality, clear-eyed. And not always "attractive." But honest as dirt.

It seems Brodkey learns that style matters little. And that is the source of true style.