A delicious throwback memoir, writerly and rich.
In five dated yet beautifully crafted essays, Fallowell (Going as Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book, 2008, etc.) mines some early trips he took for literary inspiration.
The destinations included sparsely populated Gozo, Malta and the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The author also searched for the fabulously wealthy buyer of a Scottish island, Maruma, who made art with “fire energy” and hunted for the inspiration behind the character Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Fallowell’s essays take a sweet, circuitous route, which he self-consciously describes as “a progressive revelation, as a painter starting with a few lines scattered about the canvas will eventually end up with a portrait as complete as he can make it.” The author drops hints that then reappear to guide him on his pursuits, such as happening upon an entry in The Indian Yearbook 1941-2—while stoned out of his mind in Ooty in 1975—for a woman named Bapsy Pavry who seemed to encapsulate an entire era of British imperial organization and who haunted the author for the next 20 years. Fallowell’s hopeless pursuit of Maruma in the summer of 1995, luring the author fruitlessly to the Isle of Eigg to meet him, inspires a virtuosic dissertation on the subject of the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The author’s odd journalistic persecution of the shut-in Alastair Graham, living in quiet solitude in Wales, exposes more about the sexual proclivities of the author than the once-darling “it” boy and intimate of Waugh. Fallowell ends with a swooning chronicle of London’s mad grief at the death of Princess Diana (“Beyond the Blue Horizon”).
A delicious throwback memoir, writerly and rich.Pub Date: June 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-299-29240-9
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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