A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely...
Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom.
Indonesia-based arts writer James (The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic, 2016, etc.) makes the convincing case that “since antiquity, Capri has been a hedonistic dreamland, a place where the rules do not apply: a Mediterranean prototype of Las Vegas.” This “limestone rock four square miles in extent,” far enough off the coast of Italy to make for dangerous travel before the 20th century, attracted Roman emperors looking for scenery, peace, and sensual pleasures. The author carefully untangles the various stories about Tiberius, portrayed by some as a “paranoid, bloodthirsty monarch, driven by perverted lust” and by others as a wise ruler in search of solitude, and settles on a middle ground between the two. After Rome, James dashes through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period during which a wide range of writers found their ways to Capri and started writing about each other in a kind of literary hall of mirrors. Many moved there to avoid persecution for homosexuality at home; others, to indulge in sex with children and adolescents. One of those with “a mania for young boys” was novelist Norman Douglas. Though little known now, he was the author of the bestselling South Wind, from which this book derives its title. As James roams around the island taking in mansions built by wealthy expatriates, he also examines the lives and works of lesser-known Capri novelists, such as the flamboyant Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, an admirer of “trashy romantic fiction,” in whose work “nuance is easily lost amid the dense classical allusions, perfumed tropes, and extravagant homages to adolescent flesh.”
A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-14276-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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