Findlay employs a vast family archive to bring this little-known writer to the fame he justly deserves, making readers want...
C.K. Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930) was a poet, war hero, spy and, above all, one of the world’s greatest translators. Journalist Findlay reveals his natural, effortless writing talent in this story of her great-great uncle.
Moncrieff held a low opinion of his poetry, but his ability to recognize great talent brought him into the brotherhood of the great World War I poets, including Robert Graves, Osbert Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon and, especially, Wilfred Owen. Moncrieff encouraged Owen in his writing, but it was his unrequited love of Owen that was most important. He vowed to give up poetry because his talent couldn’t compare. So many of England’s young intellectuals wrote of the horrors of war and never returned. Not so, Moncrieff; his work gloried in the chivalry and honor of soldiering and chronicled not blood and death, but flowers, integrity, friendship and the countryside. Beauty was his escape. Crippled by friendly fire and suffering from both shell shock and trench fever, he began writing reviews, criticism and translations. In 1919, he began to translate Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. It took nine years and seven volumes and was hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. So successful were his Latin, French and Italian translations that he was lauded as one poet catching the emotion of another. In the early 1920s, Moncrieff proposed that the passport office act as a cover for spies, and it was he who reported Mussolini’s attempts at expansion. A spy’s double life came easily as he’d been hiding his homosexuality for years. The most fascinating thing about Moncrieff is that he knew very little French grammar, and his Italian translations began even before he spoke the language.
Findlay employs a vast family archive to bring this little-known writer to the fame he justly deserves, making readers want to turn back to Proust.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-11927-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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