Paul Kalanithi. When Breath Becomes Air. (London: Bodley Head, 2016)

When a friend of mine found out that I had had brain surgery in 2014, she gifted me this book, probably believing that I would be able to relate to the author’s autobiographical narrative dealing with his struggle with lung cancer.
She was not wrong. Paul Kalanithi writes in an accessible manner with just a slight indication that these are the words of someone staring death in the face. He narrates quite a few episodes involving his patients and weaves in his own struggle with a disease that would eventually claim his life. Because of this there is a strong personal flavor to the whole book.
Moreover, because the reader knows that the book is written by someone with a terminal illness, you know that there is actually not going to be a proper closure to the book, which mimics life itself since we will all die leaving many loose ends and many things unresolved. So there is a sense of anticipation and apprehension because the reader does not know at which stage of the journey Kalanithi will breathe his last.
Unlike The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which I reviewed a few weeks back, When Breath Becomes Air does not have very much technical language and terms, even though both books deal with cancer. This is simply because the former is intentionally, as the subtitle indicates, a biography of cancer, while the latter is a chronicle of a neurosurgeon’s transformation from a physician to a patient.
Kalanithi tackles questions about the meaning of life and of human mortality in a stark way, never with even a hint of denial of the fact that he was staring death in the face. Even when he recounts small victories, as when a cancer appears to relapse, the reader knows that, given that the end of the book was drawing closer, so was the author’s death. This is the first book I have read in which the author knows his days are numbered and yet writes about his confrontation with death. And it is unnerving, as a reader, because you know that the voice of the author that you are growing to recognize and appreciate is going to change suddenly at the turn of a page.
I fully recommend When Breath Becomes Air to everyone who is willing to read about a genuine confrontation with death that approaches the struggle with the intention of retaining one’s dignity as a human.