Often touching—sometimes harrowing—but overlong and overwrought. (13 b&w photographs)
A British writer recalls his difficult relationship with a cold, sarcastic father—also a writer—who later vanishes into Alzheimer’s.
Novelist Gébler (How to Murder a Man, 1999, etc.) begins and ends with the insight he gained when his father died: “You can’t change the past but, with understanding, you can sometimes draw the poison out of it.” And here there’s much past, much poison, and, near the end, a few pages of understanding. Gébler starts in 1990 when he must find a custodial facility for his father, who has had a stroke and whose dementia is steadily deepening. He returns to his father’s house, gathers up his personal papers, boxes them, and stores them at home. It will be seven years before he examines them. Gébler then leaps backward to tell about his musician grandfather and his father’s career as a writer (he sold his novel The Plymouth Adventure to Hollywood; in 1952, the film opened with Spencer Tracy and Gene Tierney). Gébler remembers a lot from his early childhood (including pages of supposedly verbatim conversations), but none of it is very cheery. Three times we must read descriptions of his boyhood vomitus, and we hear a dreary litany of cruelties uttered by his father (who appears never to have struck his children): “ ‘Damned child,’ ” he muttered, ‘damn bloody child’ ” is typical. His parents eventually divorce, and Gébler and his brother, Sasha, elect to live with their mother, the writer Edna O’Brien. Gébler struggles through school, eventually fashioning for himself a career in writing and documentary filmmaking. He is disappointed when his father’s dementia does not permit the old man to appreciate how well his son has turned out. But he realizes that his father’s chronic depression caused him to behave as he did. And so Gébler can forgive him.
Often touching—sometimes harrowing—but overlong and overwrought. (13 b&w photographs)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7145-3064-6
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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