A previously suppressed portion (1932-34) of Nin's near- endless diaries that's shocking for its boundless narcissism, preciousness, and grandiosity—especially when Nin swoons over her sexual affair with her father or describes a late-term abortion. Unexpurgation, in this case, overwhelms the famous, liberated love scenes with Henry Miller and June, making Nin seem paltry and pitiable because she is so blindly self-absorbed. ``A marvelous story,'' Henry Miller writes to Nin in these pages—``but a bad diary.'' Sprinkled throughout these dreamlike fragments are the names of fascinating lovers: Henry and June, of course; Nin's long- suffering husband, Hugh; French poet and dramatist Antonin Artaud; and Otto Rank (Nin's analyst as well as her lover, who warns her that diaries are her opium habit, unlikely to lead to enlightenment). But Nin's prose is muddled and sketchy, always circling back to her moods and qualities and neuroses, never touching down long enough to give the reader a sense of place: ``I leap like a squirrel about Paris, laughing at astrological predictions.'' Indeed, Nin leaps from bed to bed, always ending up with Henry. But external events, even the Great Depression, concern her only as they advance or limit her own enjoyment. In a rare moment of unadorned candor, she admits ``that there is a deformity in my vision which no intelligence can cure.'' This is never more apparent than when she describes her sexual affair with her father, her ``double'' or ``male half'': ``Is this love of my double that self-love again?'' Most readers will answer with a resounding ``yes.'' Though it will probably generate some prurient interest, in the end this is an overheated muddle of thoughts and notes about a black hole of self-absorption.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-144366-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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