The deceptively effortless translation by Stein renders this a treasure at once absurd and heartbreaking.
A skillful blurring of art and reality is achieved in French author Bouillier’s beguilingly spare “account” of recovery from a romantic heartbreak.
A sudden call from a lover who left him abruptly years before lurches the narrator of this fiction-cum-memoir from a state of cold paralysis into preparation for battle. The vanished girlfriend resurfaces to invite the narrator to the birthday party of her husband’s best friend, artist Sophie Calle, who always invites a “mystery guest” to represent the year to come, and which the narrator has been designated. This blast from the past strikes the still emotionally raw narrator, caught napping and vulnerable in the afternoon, as a way to finally “cut the leash” that tied him to the former girlfriend’s inexplicable vanishing—and achieve at last a sense of redemption. The weeks before the big night plunge the narrator back into the hellish despair of having to think about the former lover constantly, conveyed in self-aggrandizing, hilarious reflections on matters such as the ridiculous turtlenecks he has taken to wearing as a kind of Band-Aid. He obsesses over signs of fate, coincidences, “a force seeking some means of self-expression,” such as the orbiting of the Ulysses space probe, in order to make sense of the former girlfriend’s reappearance in his life. Determined not to be the laughingstock of the party, he decides on the perfect gift to bring: a bottle of vintage Margaux well beyond his means. And on the night of Reckoning, when he nervously, warily presents himself, his now-married and very lovely former girlfriend informs him that the hostess, Sophie, never opens her presents, rather she displays them. In fact, meeting the girlfriend again does not elucidate anything for the narrator except in her whispered parting words about the bouquet of cut roses—straight from Mrs. Dalloway—which then lifts his battered heart into the divine, redemptive realm of literature.
The deceptively effortless translation by Stein renders this a treasure at once absurd and heartbreaking.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-18570-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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