Brechneff leavens his account of adventure, simple pleasures and hard work in a magical landscape with interludes from his...
Artist and author Brechneff (Homage: Encounters with the East, 2007) chronicles his 30-year courtship with the Aegean isle of Sifnos, recalling his passages of self-discovery, development as a painter and ambivalence over his island identity.
Punctuated by spare, evocative sketches—seascapes, landscapes, portraits—the book, written with Brechneff’s partner, Lovejoy, is no mere travelogue of an idyllic retreat, but something of a sociological study as well as an examination of sexual confusion and the perils of adopting a persona that becomes a behavioral trap. Brechneff was born in 1950 in the Belgian Congo, the son of a Russian émigré father and a Swiss mother. Feeling like an alien in Switzerland in his teens, he was drawn not only to the romance of island life, but to the prospect of being cut off, freed from the strictures of proper Swiss society in a culture that seemed lodged in another century. On Sifnos, he found limitless inspiration, warmth and hospitality, but also deeply ingrained traditions and habits. Each summer, beginning in 1972, Brechneff basked in the Greek light and reveled in his new skin. Pictures poured out of him, leading to increasing success in London and New York. The author’s alluring narrative combines erotic liaisons with vivid portraits of islanders and visitors, though the sheer number of these encounters and friendships renders them less distinct in the end. He wavers between being unusually self-aware and tiresomely self-absorbed, engaging about his work but preoccupied with sexual longings and conquests, often depicting himself as a caricature of the voracious young omnisexual. Yet his candor is winning, and hard to resist, as we follow his growth from naïve young man to worldly, accomplished adult.
Brechneff leavens his account of adventure, simple pleasures and hard work in a magical landscape with interludes from his life in Europe and America. Yet, happily, the author seldom strays far from his beloved island refuge, even when its enduring entreaty begins to wane.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0374166717
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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