An exceptional recreation of la France profonde of the 19th century. Novelist and biographer Tindall (The Born Exile: George Gissing, 1974, etc.) begins her journey into the past of CÇlestine Chaumette and her village in central France when she stumbles upon seven letters lying long forgotten in a cupboard in the home of CÇlestine's granddaughter. The letters date back to when CÇlestine was a young woman in the mid-19th century; most are from thwarted suitors who courted the innkeeper's refined daughter before she wed the oil-presser Pierre Robin in 1865 and settled down to the difficult life of a married woman in the French countryside. From this slight bit of physical evidence, Tindall delves into CÇlestine's life, speculating about what she and those around her might have thought, eaten, and worn, how they might have been born, married, and died. Tindall also describes her own experiences as a part-time inhabitant of the village, her research, and the unlimited access she is given to village records dating as far back as the French Revolution. With her eagle eye, the author gleans a miraculous amount of information from this cryptic material. She then colors her portrait with details from contemporary newspapers and memoirs, interviews with residents of the area today, and fictionalized descriptions of the region in the 19th century, including some set down by George Sand, who lived nearby. Tindall also sketches portraits of some of the village's other residents, past and present, from CÇlestine's grandfather Franáois, born before the Revolution, to the Australian painter who lived with CÇlestine's granddaughter ZÇnaãde in the house where the author would later find the seven well-worn letters. The result is an example of excellent social-historical detection written with a novelist's feel for character and place.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4546-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
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