A literary life of major importance, authoritatively told in an exceptionally fine biography.
An eminent Oxford scholar offers a trenchant analysis of the ethnic, historical-political, and cultural matrices that produced the late (1899–1986) Argentinean literary magus.
Borges was born into a liberal Buenos Aires family with a history (sometimes retrospectively exaggerated) of active involvement in the liberation of its country from Spain and its city's economic and cultural development. Williamson places understandable emphasis on Borges's unbreakable lifelong attachments to his “spirited, highly intelligent” mother and his morose father, a prominent physician and failed writer. Deftly connecting the son's later poems and stories with the events and stages of his early life, Williamson constructs a vividly convincing picture of a bookish, sickly boy who in effect grew up in a library, developed a personal aesthetic based largely on his introduction to modernist literary movements during his family's European travels, and rose gradually to prominence among the Argentinean avant-garde. Several failed relationships with women inspired a Dantean search for love and wholeness, and the incipient blindness that would eventually overtake him narrowed his artistic horizons—even as his conflicted stances vis-à-vis his country's political revolutions doubtless influenced his rejection of attempts to contain reality within formal literary structures (e.g., the novel) and his embrace of irony, relativism, “verbal artifice,” and the liberating energies inherent in myths and legends. Williamson expertly summarizes the years of Borges's international fame, earned by his landmark 1944 volume Ficciones and its similarly distinguished successors, and movingly evokes the image of an aging literary lion out of touch with the failed regimes that followed Juan Perón's disastrous tenures, incessantly traveling to lecture abroad and collect awards and honorary degrees, finding muted happiness at last with the much younger Maria Kodama, the “literary secretary” who became the consolation of his old age, and—at last—his Beatrice.
A literary life of major importance, authoritatively told in an exceptionally fine biography.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-88579-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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