Sunny, island-hopping philhellenism as encountered in Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi and Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus. Translator, scholar, novelist, and well-respected Hellenist Keeley (School for Pagan Lovers, 1993, etc.) lets himself fall under the spell of the characteristically colorful Greek travel writings of Miller and Durrell in the same way that they fell under the spell of prewar, pretourist Greece. Durrell and his wife moved to the island of Corfu in 1935, after a little bohemianism in Paris, where they had known Miller, and they eventually enticed him to visit in 1939. Durrell had already settled into the island’s community, discovered C.V. Cavafy’s poetry, and spent most of his time bathing in the warm Mediterranean and the country’s Homeric heritage. Miller also found the countryside, company, and literary life convivial. Among those with whom they struck up friendships were the gourmand and man of letters George Katsimbalis, who would figure as Miller’s “Colossus,” and George Seferis, who would become Greece’s first Nobel laureate, in 1963. Miller’s paean to Greece—“No country I have visited has given me such a sense of grandeur . . .”—came long after he had traveled all over the islands, and Keeley retraces his wanderings with unhurried pleasure. With WWII, Miller and Durrell were forced to leave, Miller never to return, Durrell for only a few years, and Keeley’s account of what their friends suffered under the Nazis is a spare but moving example of how literature survives and helps others to survive. Keeley, as longtime translator of Cavafy, Seferis, and others, skillfully works excerpts from their poetry into his account’s sun-drenched landscape, giving a sense of how modern Greek culture still lives on Homer’s islands. Learned literary tourism about literary tourism, in one of the best places on earth for it.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-17717-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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