Sure to interest Godwin’s constant readers, but others may wish for future volumes written by a more mature writer.
The sentimental education of now-eminent novelist Godwin (Unfinished Desires, 2010, etc.).
This second volume of her journals begins when the author was 26, exhibiting all the angsty personal concerns of a 26-year-old, blended with bookish interests in intellectual matters such as the suffering existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and the psychology of Carl Jung. She has given up a husband and a fledgling career in journalism and has moved to a tiny flat in London, where she cultivated her “dramatic self” and gathered experiences that she later put to good use in her writing. The journals are self-absorbed and a touch juvenile (why should they not be?), as Godwin writes, “I am astonished by who I am and what I have done. The dangerous thing is to judge myself by the standards of other people.” The early pages show a mix of self-doubt, introspection, and exhortation (“I must write about going to the movies alone and why it is so good”), along with the little writerly gossip she is privy to at such a remove from the American literary scene. Godwin seems neither very likable nor very interesting until, a couple of years into her stay, she opened her eyes to the world around her—a turn that takes particularly effective form as she witnesses Winston Churchill’s funeral—and resolved to become a real writer. Even so, there is scarcely any hint that the 1960s are swirling around her, a flirtation with then-trendy Scientology notwithstanding. Fledgling writers should stick with it, though, since Godwin eventually gets down to business and reveals bits and pieces about the whys and hows of writing and the tough work of getting words on paper (“I don’t like this chapter yet, but will not stop until I capture what I want”).
Sure to interest Godwin’s constant readers, but others may wish for future volumes written by a more mature writer.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6433-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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