If there are any heavens; a memoir

 

Title of the book: If there are any heavens; a memoir 

Author: Nicholas Montemarano

Publisher: Persea 

Publishing Date: 2022

ISBN: 9780892555574

Summary:

On January 6, 2021, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, while the U.S. Capitol is under attack, Nicholas Montemarano drives six hundred miles to see his mother, who is hospitalized with COVID pneumonia and in a critical state. For ten days he lives in a hotel minutes from the hospital, alternating between hope and helplessness. This is the story of those ten days. It is the story of the pandemic told through the intimate prism of one family’s loss.  

Written with visceral urgency in the earliest days of grief, If There Are Any Heavens resists categorization: it is a memoir, a poem, a mournful but loving song. Its form asks readers to slow down and breathe between each broken line. At other moments, a chorus of voices—anti-maskers, COVID-deniers, and doctors—causes the reader to become breathless. It is an almost real-time account of the anxiety, uncertainty, and sorrow brought on by this pandemic. It is also, finally, a devastating homage to a family’s love in a time of great loss.  

Now, and many years from now, when people want to understand the personal cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, they will turn to this intimate and spare elegy from a son to his mother.

Author Info:
(From goodreads)

Nicholas Montemarano's most recent novel, The Senator's Children, was published by Tin House Books. He is the author of two previous novels and a short story collection. His first memoir, If There Are Any Heavens, will be published in 2022. He has received a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fellowship. He grew up in Queens and now lives in Lancaster, PA, where he is the Alumni Professor of Creative Writing and Belles Lettres at Franklin & Marshall College.

Personal Opinion:

Two years later, corona has lost its threat, and who knows, even now it feels as if things are getting back to "normal" with very few wearing masks anywhere and recklessly opening up the world. However, in 2020 it's a different story of terror that from youngest to oldest will long remember, a marker that will define humanity. And unfortunately for the author, Nicholas Montemarano, he had to lose to his beloved mother to give us a time capsule of 2020 to 2021, when corona was a word synonymous with Black Death, and when monsters felt all too real, which is what I felt when reading this memoir which is both poetry and memoir in one. It's definitely heartbreaking, timely and just shoots through the body. 

This was given for review 

5 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)