An understated, observant, and earnest memoir from an acclaimed novelist.
The second installment of American novelist Plante’s memoir (Becoming a Londoner, 2013, etc.) of his long love affair with Nikos Stangos (1936-2004), the Greek-born editor of the publishing house Thames and Hudson.
In this elegant follow-up to Becoming a Londoner, the author concentrates on the 1980s, moving among London, Italy, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Deaths among his gay community from HIV/AIDS were just becoming a creeping, recurring reality in Plante’s diary, which he kept dutifully during his life with Stangos. Since the mid-1960s, the two had cultivated a deep friendship with poet Stephen Spender and his Russian wife, Natasha. They benefitted from Spender’s stellar social connections with artists like David Hockney and moved in a tight artistic circle in London and New York as well as Lucca, Italy, where Plante and Stangos lived together. The worldly Spender (in his 70s) appears here infatuated with a young American student, and their correspondence was strictly kept from his wife by using Plante and Stangos as go-betweens. Plante, in his mid-40s, also battled duel affections—e.g., for his former Turkish lover who lived in New York and died shockingly of AIDS; and successful American artist Jennifer Bartlett, about whom Plante was truly conflicted. Both relationships caused Stangos terrible agonies of jealousy, while Stangos’ flirtation with a young man in his publishing office greatly affected Plante. The most engaging moments in the book chronicle the time when the author shared a house in Tulsa with prickly Australian critic Germaine Greer and they both got jobs teaching at the University of Tulsa. Also entertaining is Plante’s anecdote about when he was asked by acquaintance Philip Roth to accompany him to Israel to research a new novel. Full of questions about Plante’s non-Jewishness and sexuality, Roth may have used Plante as a model for his goyish character in The Counterlife (1986).
An understated, observant, and earnest memoir from an acclaimed novelist.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4088-5480-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2015
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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