While occasionally crotchety about personal travails, Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of “our poet of the...
A typically sharp-eyed, tart tour by longtime New Yorker writer Malcolm (The Crime of Sheila McGough, 1999, etc.) to the places—and the creative landscape—associated with the Russian master.
Playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) has become as misunderstood as he is beloved, Malcolm feels, not just by critics but by his homeland. As she travels to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and especially Gurzuv and Yalta (where Chekhov spent his last five years), Malcolm fumes at post-Communist Russia—not just at inconveniences such as lost luggage and seedy hotels, but at guides who sometimes seem more interested in palaces or old-time film star Deanna Durbin than they do in Chekhov. She grumps about this “absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an ‘original scene’ that can only fall short of his expectations.” Occasionally, Malcolm resorts to one of her trademark cranky generalities about factual writing (a novice journalist, she insists, who wishes to render subjects “in all their unruly complexity and contradictoriness is soon disabused”). But once she considers Chekhov’s life and work in earnest, her numerous insights run against the critical grain without falling into contrarianism for its own sake. For instance, she notes that far from being nonjudgmental, Chekhov underscores the nature of evil in stories such as “Ward No. 6”; that despite his overriding concern with ordinary lives, he was irresistibly attracted to useless beauty; and that, as someone who battled tuberculosis for almost a third of his life, his masterpieces obliquely tell what it is like to live under the constant shadow of death. She seamlessly stitches together both standard biographical information (such as his attitude toward his brutal and improvident father) and close analysis and interpretation (e.g., of memoirists’ varying accounts of Chekhov’s death, including the bizarre transport of his corpse back to Moscow in a refrigerated railway car filled with oysters).
While occasionally crotchety about personal travails, Malcolm offers a stirring, roving chronicle of “our poet of the provisional and fragmentary.”Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50668-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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IN THE NEWS
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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