Longtime fans will naturally savor Codrescu’s idiosyncratic ambling and real-life reflections. New readers will find...
Poet, essayist and novelist Codrescu (Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments, 2011, etc.) examines the oft-sensationalized “death of print” and redefines its place in the bigger picture of literary history.
Part cultural critique, part portrait of the artist as a young literary revolutionary, the author’s latest is a mature look at the rise of e-printing from the vantage point of someone who has already experienced, and survived, a number of technological revolutions. Codrescu recounts his growth as a writer, from his childhood in Romania to his tenure as a professor at LSU, tracing his journey through the “archives” of his life, which frequently spill over into footnotes. These footnotes go on for pages, offering insight into autobiographical and historical information that literally surrounds the primary body of text. Readers may ruminate on the footnotes as a simultaneous representation of old-fashioned marginalia at its finest and a Wikipedia-like informational hall of mirrors. Or, thin on patience, they may ignore them altogether. Codrescu’s self-proclaimed “referential injoking” may try that same patience, but what elevates the author’s argument is his understanding that what technology has actually defeated isn’t writing or publishing (if anything, there’s more of both of them than ever); it’s “the flaws, the failures, the typos, the sweat, the traces of the human on the material,” the works and remnants that ground a text in a real, flawed world. The pixelated kingdom, Codrescu observes, is highly ordered and smudge-free, occupying neither space nor time, like a virtual vapor that leaves no sensual trace for future generations of scholars and readers to study and treasure.
Longtime fans will naturally savor Codrescu’s idiosyncratic ambling and real-life reflections. New readers will find philosophical nuggets after some digging.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9838683-3-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: ANTIBOOKCLUB
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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