Heartfelt but patchy. For more penetrating insights, see Olivier Todd’s Albert Camus: A Life (1997).
A whimsical sojourn into the life of Nobel-winning French “writer of conscience.”
Former New Yorker staff writer Hawes (New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 1869-1930, 1993) claims that she feels “a cosmic connection” to Albert Camus (1913–60). The author mostly forgoes literary analysis, focusing instead on what his daily life was like, and how the challenges he faced informed the literature he produced. Passing cursorily over Camus’s years in Algeria, primarily for lack of source material, the early chapters are choppy. Extensive quotations from his personal journal are juxtaposed with musings and descriptions of Hawes’s trips to France to find “the essence of the French identity.” The author then breezily discusses Camus’s meteoric rise to fame in Paris as editor of Combat, and the publication of his most enduring book, The Stranger (1942). Though Hawes claims that Camus’s editorials were “the talk of the town,” she doesn’t tell us why. Instead she attempts to capture the atmosphere of postwar France by staying at the Hotel Lutetia and ordering “a dozen oysters and a glass of Sancerre.” The narrative picks up when Hawes examines the impact of TB on Camus’s life. Providing graphic insights into how the disease both debilitated and motivated him from its onset in his teenage years, Hawes correctly notes how it magnified his sense of exile, of being the outsider. Camus saw himself as having a “high moral purpose,” and when he published his nonfiction book The Rebel in 1951, criticizing the tyrannical aspects of revolutions, he invoked the ire of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Parisian pro-Soviet, communist intelligentsia. Hawes provides delicious detail about Sartre’s public attack on Camus’s character and work, a painful betrayal by his former friend. After a period of shock and writer’s block, Camus’s rejection motivated him to write The Fall (1956), which earned him a Nobel Prize before his death in a car crash in 1960.
Heartfelt but patchy. For more penetrating insights, see Olivier Todd’s Albert Camus: A Life (1997).Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1889-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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