First published in 1973 by a small Canadian press, this autobiographical debut novel, from the Montreal-based Charney, renders the extraordinary events of a childhood in post-WW II Poland in a dispassionate, affectless voice. By the time the narrator turns five, she's spent half her life in a hayloft, huddling with a group of Polish Jews who are hiding from the Germans. Now freed by a patrol of kindly Russian soldiers, the child is shocked and delighted by the world she'd forgotten: She thrills to the feeling of the wind, the fragrance of grain. Returning with her mother and aunt to Dobryd, their former hometown, they find the place in ruins but settle into what becomes a bustling community of survivors. Meanwhile, the girl's aunt reminisces about the family's former great wealth, the young anarchists and communists who kept prewar life in Dobryd lively, and the narrator's mother's desperate escape from the about-to-be- liquidated Jewish ghetto to the hayloft haven. Amid these occasionally disturbing stories, the narrator tries on life as a ``normal'' child, losing herself in play with other kids and observing with semidetachment the emotional fragility of her mother and aunt. Charney's novel covers unusual ground: It explores the possibility of happiness in a setting of devastating loss and reveals a hungry childhood spirit that seeks identity and fulfillment, despite the fact that those around her are numb with grief. This child's-eye-view of a world without innocence is momentarily arresting, but readers are kept at an enforced arm's length: While newcomer Charney successfully avoids sentimentalism, her controlled tone robs the story of its immediacy. In all, a frustratingly clinical take on a fertile subject.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-877946-66-4
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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