Essential for García Márquez fans, and an exemplary literary biography.
A probing biography of the 1982 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, whom Pablo Neruda hailed as a Cervantes for our time.
Martin (Modern Languages/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century, 1989, etc.) begins by noting that he has been working on this life of Gabriel García Márquez for two decades. The effort shows. Born in 1927, García Márquez remains best known for the book he published when he was 40, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a generational epic whose landscape stretches from ocean to deep jungle. Martin’s signal contribution is to reveal, even more so than García Márquez did in his memoir, just how roman à clef–ish that fictional world is. Yet, of course, a particular storytelling genius is needed to bring even the liveliest real-world figures into habitation in a novel. Martin rightly notes that whereas the literature of the first half of the 20th century has several central figures—Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway et al.—that of the latter half finds only García Márquez universally acknowledged as a master. That acknowledgment took years to come, of course, and early on García Márquez was written off as a would-be Faulkner—Faulkner being one of his idols and central to the development of modern Latin American literature, a body of work in which, as Martin also observes, García Márquez’s writings appear conservative against his postmodern fellows, and even scorned for being “transparent, easy to read, and accessible even to people who only had a modest literary education.” Martin offers lucid literary commentary alongside the facts of his subject’s life, which, as is well known, was marked by excellence in journalism and controversy in politics. Though García Márquez was a noted scourger of Yankee imperialism and friend of Castro, Chavez and the like, he was not shy about having amassed considerable wealth over a long career.
Essential for García Márquez fans, and an exemplary literary biography.Pub Date: May 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27177-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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