illus., not seen)
A masterful life of the eccentric pioneer who mapped the modern mind in Remembrance of Things Past (more accurately
translated here as In Search of Lost Time), by the noted Proust scholar (French/Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham; The Proustian Quest, not reviewed). In seeking to reveal how one of the century’s towering novelists (1871–1922) "came to produce what is arguably the most brilliant, sustained prose narration in the history of literature," Carter has produced a long, loving annotation to the autobiographical In Search. He explores his subject with a scholar's care, a novelist's eye, and a generous tolerance for readers without French. His hero is invariably ill, most often with asthma, a condition he exacerbates with drugs, a nocturnal lifestyle, and an erratic diet (in his last days he consumes only ice cream and beer; his death follows his adamant refusal to accept medical treatment for pneumonia). Proust's legendary eccentricities are on full display: his cork-lined living quarters (to ensure the quiet he craves), his vampirish avoidance of daylight, his endless revisions of his texts (In Search requires "one of the most demanding productions in the history of publishing"), and his prodigality (he recklessly spends nearly all of his enormous inheritance). Noting the fascination of Proust’s lifestyle for contemporary readers, Carter labors to explain his complicated sexuality (he fights a duel with a reviewer who has suggested he is gay, but he also pursues young men, regarding waiters at the Ritz as a particular delicacy) and is determined to establish that Proust "never attempted to deny his Jewish heritage." Not even Carter's considerable narrative gifts, however, can make Proust's bedridden later years, marked by a contentious, complicated correspondence with his publisher, as compelling as his early, more extroverted life. A prodigious work, rich and racy, informed by fact, animated by imagination, utterly worthy of its wondrous subject. (47
illus., not seen)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08145-6
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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