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    This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
    Unavailable
    This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
    Unavailable
    This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
    Ebook142 pages3 hours

    This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

    By Harold Brodkey

    3.5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    A meditation on dying by a writer who has been compared to Proust, was much praised by Salman Rushdie and is perhaps most famous for producing very little.

    Harold Brodkey died of AIDS in January 1996. His last written words, produced hours before his own extinction, appeared in the New Yorker magazine the week of his death. This book is the author’s terrifying and intimate account of his journey into darkness.

    Born in 1930 in Illinois, Brodkey’s mother died when he was two, after which he became withdrawn and mute for over two years. He emerged from his silent cocoon as a prodigy, however, and both his parents and his trauma figure largely in his writing. He went to Harvard, and moved to New York in 1953, publishing his first collection of short stories in 1957. Despite publishing very little for the next 31 years, Brodkey developed one of the most extraordinary reputations in modern letters, and has been compared by serious critics to Milton, Wordsworth, Freud and Proust.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJan 30, 2014
    ISBN9780007401741
    Unavailable
    This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
    Author

    Harold Brodkey

    Brodkey’s short stories for the New Yorker were collected in his 1957 First Love and Other Sorrows. A second collection of short stories, The Abundant Dreamer, appeared in 1988, and his long-awaited novel The Runaway Soul three years later.

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    Reviews for This Wild Darkness

    3.5/5

    17 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I had only read Brodkey's collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, probably a dozen years ago, and admired his writing. This is necessarily a very dark book, an examination of his last years and months after he learns he has AIDS. It sounds incongruous, I suppose, to say I felt a kinship with Brodkey, but I did, and it was mostly because of this statement - "I am an addict of language, of storytelling and of journalism. I read, not frenziedly anymore, but constantly. I long to love other people's words, other people for their words, their ideas." Well I am not terminally ill, as Brodkey knew he was when he wrote those words, but I knew what he meant. The importance of life: our lives, other people's lives; and the stories from those lives are equally important, to preserve those lives. Brodkey continued to feel this way right up to the end, as evidenced in one of the final entries in This Wild Darkness - "And I am still writing, as you see. I am practicing making entries in my journal, recording my passage into nonexistence. This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over." This was not, of course, a happy book, but it is an important one from a very talented writer. - Tim Bazzett, author of Love, War & Polio
    • 3/5
      Fabulous language, gorgeous emotional honesty, and why in the end do I care so little? His wife seems to me a woman who made a bad bargain and stuck with it; he seems self aware and unblinkingly honest about his fate, but some essential something that would give this book its heart wasn't put into it. I suppose it could be the supre-tight focus on Brodkey's death and death alone that makes me feel somehow bereft of personal feeling. Perhaps I feel slightly uninterested because I know so little of the man himself before the illness. I can't really be certain, since my editorial sense deserted me as I read this book. I fell into a fogged unwillingness to read or stop reading, a very unusual state for me. A very strange book.