Despite distracting tense changes, Hoyle offers generous interpretations of Miller’s oeuvre.
A refreshing biography of Henry Miller (1891–1980) that plunges into his work and spares readers some tedious early detail.
California-based educator and documentary filmmaker Hoyle catches up with Miller in 1939, when he was wrapping up his years of bohemian living in Paris, facing the prospect of German invasion and coming war. The social and moral collapses he witnessed about him are vividly captured in the work he produced during the 1930s, published by Jack Kahane through his Obelisk Press in Paris. These included Miller’s signature works celebrating the “artist of life,” such as Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934, which gave him notoriety in Europe but was banned in England and the United States for alleged obscenity until the early 1960s. Indeed, at this juncture, Miller was frustrated by the inability to publish his work in America. As impecunious as when he arrived in Paris, he was fatalistic about his future writing career: “I lack the courage for further hardships.” Moreover, his important love and benefactress, Anaïs Nin, was not going to leave her husband and make an idyllic life with Miller, and his interludes in Corfu and to New York meant an imminent break with her. Hoyle quotes extensively from Miller’s prodigious correspondence. Dismayed by the ugly acquisitiveness of New York, Miller nonetheless reconnected with his troubled family in Brooklyn, writing about this period as the reconciliation of the prodigal son. Moving to California, and being offered, in 1944, a cheap cabin to use in Big Sur, a region of startling natural beauty, radically altered Miller’s sense of his American identity and destiny as a writer. Here he would embark on his deeply autobiographical account of his upbringing, The Rosy Crucifixion, and forge important new relationships that would nourish his work and solidify his literary legacy as more than a “lowly pornographer.”
Despite distracting tense changes, Hoyle offers generous interpretations of Miller’s oeuvre.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61145-899-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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