Not much here that hasn’t been exhaustively discussed in Norman Sherry’s three-volume The Life of Graham Greene (1989, 1995,...
Misty remembrances by Greene’s late-life French mistress reveal intimate moments but few state secrets.
Cloetta was interviewed shortly before her death in 2001 by French journalist Allain, whose parents were friends of Greene’s. (The mysterious 1960 assassination in Morocco of the interviewer’s father, Resistance hero Yves Allain, provides a shadowy subtext here.) Cloetta recalls first meeting the famous English author in 1959, when she was living in Douala, Cameroon, with her importer husband and two teenaged daughters. Diminutive, boyish and intelligent, 36-year-old Cloetta was apparently in the process of separation (though she never actually divorced), while Greene, at 55, had not quite extricated himself from his relationship with Catherine Walston. Nonetheless, after he moved permanently to Antibes in the mid-1960s the lovers allowed themselves to be “carried away by passion,” as Cloetta describes it to Allain. The interviewer asks some barbed questions: Did the reluctant Cloetta ever wonder, after being lured by Greene to a Paris brothel for an evening of fun, what kind of “very strange character” she was getting involved with? “My whole life has been a secret,” Cloetta provocatively asserts; appropriately, her answers are elusive. Allain can’t even get Cloetta to admit that Greene was playing a double game with his good friend, English spy turned Soviet defector Kim Philby. She acknowledges only that “to the very end, he worked with the British Services.” Cloetta’s portrait of her lover is touching and convincing. It also confirms his “passion for secrecy”: the doubts, suspicions and aspersions cast since Greene’s death in 1991 won’t likely ever be cleared.
Not much here that hasn’t been exhaustively discussed in Norman Sherry’s three-volume The Life of Graham Greene (1989, 1995, 2004)—or, for that matter, in Allain’s own The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (1983).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7475-7108-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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