A fascinating, sometimes bumpy ride through the more grotesque regions of literary experience, for lovers of the half-rhyme...
English critic Wilson's study of several notoriously intense couplings shows how certain literary obsessions—assimilating the world through reading, sustaining oneself through writing—become interchangeable with heterosexual passion.
Perhaps the most famous example of literary seduction, that of Robert Browning by Elizabeth Barrett, stands in Wilson's introduction for the kind of relationship she is not investigating. Although it offers a very clear case of a passion for someone's writing can be transferred to the author's self, the Barrett-Browning affair resolved itself into something too fully personal to illustrate the kind of conflation of literary with physical engagement that Wilson has in mind. Instead, her model case is the far stormier relation between Byron and Caroline Lamb. Psychoanalysis and the mythic preoccupations of literary Modernism provide the background for the entwining narcissisms of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, as well as for the mutually devouring ideals of Robert Graves and Laura Riding. The chapter on Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam considers these drives in the very different climate of totalitarian political repression, where the very literal struggle between artistic power and physical force compelled poets to become their poems, and readers to become their sarcophagi. A final note on Yeats finds a rather unexpected opposition between the spiritual appeal of compulsive writing and obsessive romanticism. Although Wilson is not addressing an academic audience, she occasionally presumes on a wider literary culture than should be expected of a general reader; conscientious editing would have yielded more straightforward exposition and textual examples, and some needed brevity. Her arguments are, nevertheless, passionate and absorbing, and the overall aim to infuse the acts of reading and writing with a sense of mystery and urgency is laudable.
A fascinating, sometimes bumpy ride through the more grotesque regions of literary experience, for lovers of the half-rhyme between books and sex.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26193-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
