Offbeat, imaginative essays for fans of literary experimentation.
A writer digs into the past “to retrieve what was lost.”
Nutt follows up her debut poetry collection, Wilderness Champion, with her first book of prose, a spare gathering of 18 numbered, interrelated essays (a “personal canon”) comprised of memories held together by fragmentary, epigrammatic thoughts, images, and lists. Running throughout the text are references to literary works, word etymologies, and films, in particular monster or horror movies—zombie, vampire, slasher, etc.—which Nutt juxtaposes against confessional, often painful personal reflections. “Horror is a reaction, recognition, a response to a call,” she writes. Sorrow and death haunt her intimate “map of the bereaved”—especially the suicides in Nutt’s family: her father-in-law, uncle, and great uncle—and quiet ruminating and somber musing abound. “If we attach ourselves to art,” writes the author, “maybe art can attach itself to us….I am making a lineage of what lingers.” Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? lurks in the background as Nutt ponders her experiences as a participant in child beauty pageants. “Each second,” she writes, “tilted toward another chance to prove I was charming and beautiful.” Wondering if anyone died in the house she lived in, she thinks about visiting a website that provides such information but decides against it, “too afraid to know.” The author’s descriptions of relationships—childhood, family, friends, sexual—weave in and out, like walking into different rooms to experience what is there, try to understand it, feel it, question it, and then move on to another room. She worries that “despair is contagious and if I’m not careful I’ll infect everyone around me.” Putting together her book, piece by piece, is an act of belief, as Nutt tries “to write my own self back” from the dead. Here, “survival is attached to telling.” Although obtuse and rambling at times, the strange, uncanny prose rhythms created in these essays are affecting, like lucid dreams.
Offbeat, imaginative essays for fans of literary experimentation.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953387-00-4
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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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