An engaging, occasionally frustrating, but generally very satisfying notebook, filled with acutely observed moments both...
A quirky, offbeat memoir-cum-journal from a leading Polish poet.
Although he modestly disclaims any major role in the Polish opposition of the 1970s and after, Zagajewski (Two Cities, 1995) is an important literary figure who was vocally dissident in the era of the great resistance to Communism in Poland. Here, he reflects back on those days and earlier with a mixture of dry-eyed nostalgia and wry-tongued wit. The author has no problem whatsoever in poking fun at the pretensions of a group of achingly, embarrassingly sincere 20-somethings—never hesitating to include himself among his targets. But the spirit of this book is generous to a fault, particularly in its evocation of the battered and weary faculty members whom he encountered during his college days in Krakow. What makes this volume unusual is its formal structure. Zagajewski alternates between reminiscences of the 1960s and ’70s in Krakow, prose poems about his current life in Paris (and Houston, although the Texas city is almost never evoked), and notebook and journal jottings on a wide range of topics, chiefly music and poetry. Holding this potpourri together are certain thematic threads: writers who opine in "defense of poetry" and what that entails; the variegated effects of music on troubled minds; the vagaries of memory; and the life of cities. As he admits early in the book, "I can only try to reclaim a few moments, a few places and events; a few people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised." The result is a series of elliptical, sometimes cryptic anecdotes, recollections, image flashes, and miniatures.
An engaging, occasionally frustrating, but generally very satisfying notebook, filled with acutely observed moments both past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-17652-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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