A touching insight into how we build our sense of self.
A hypnotizing memoir exploring depths of severe illness, identity, and memory itself.
Clendinnen (Reading the Holocaust, 1999) provides a discursive account of her childhood in Geelong, Australia during WWII, of her parents, and of her current experience fighting against liver disease. The author, whose degenerative illness leaves her prone to hallucinations, first takes the reader on a meandering tour of ephemeral images past and present, including recollections of early-life impressions of animals, folk stories, and the raw sights and sounds of hospital respite. She takes into account the associations behind her train of thought. In one case, while in the hospital, she remembers a girlish fascination with a tiger at the zoo. “I too was in a cage with feeding times and washing times and bars at the sides of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod,” she writes. As her memories gain coherence, the reader is drawn into the story of Clendinnen’s parents, her childhood, and daily life in the town of Geelong. These are relayed not so much in narrative but in mood and feeling (“When my father was shaving it was warm fragrant, sun-yellow”). The author is at her most engaging when she struggles to shape an accurate picture from memories of her parents—a pursuit that acknowledges the frustration of the parent-child relationship. “We will be able to look directly at them only when death has lifted their shadow from us,” she bemoans. Clendinnen moves through her remembrances in a trancelike state, often making use of abstract metaphors (e.g., she describes herself during one period of convalescence as being “held together by shadow knitting”). The result is a powerful and vivid recollection, in the mire of self-absorption.
A touching insight into how we build our sense of self.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0600-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
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