In what is developing as a series of journals of visits back home to South Africa (A Season in Paradise, 1980, recounted a secret incursion in 1974), Paris-based Afrikaans poet and activist ex-prisoner Breytenbach (Memory of Snow and Dust, 1989, etc.) here faces a homeland that now will admit him but that quivers with apprehension, where change is not close to jelling. Mandela is back on the scene, de Klerk has succeeded the jackboot Botha regime, and new possibilities seem to be in the wind. But possibilities are not structures, and Breytenbach is cleareyed enough to see orthodoxies reasserting themselves under different names. The ANC already appears to him top-heavy with nomenklatura; and while much white posturing is going on, white comprehension joins it rarely. As ever, Breytenbach's style is gauzy, poetic, and in the end a roadblock (``Before we didn't know of the existence of death, then we saw ducks copulating like the two hands of an old man trying to remember the art of forgetting, and we saw how the trees were black with fruit. The human being is destructive matter. The brief flame of knowing. Homo detritus. Carrion. My hands are rotting in Africa. The writer as destroyer of infinity''). It's a shame, too—for in his jaundiced eye, much that's valuable is registered (there's a revealing tableau, for instance, of Mandela during a state visit to France), a feeling for the African continent that's truly profound. But it's muddied nearly the whole way through by the impressionism and cockading stylistic swirls.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-177086-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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
SEEN & HEARD
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