Still, a gracefully executed hall of mirrors.
A Scottish ghostwriter materializes with a florid, aphoristic, generous account of her nearly 15-year association with Quartet Books in England.
Erdal’s poignant and even-spirited memoir tells of the “finely balanced symbiosis” she achieved from 1981, when she first met the wealthy Lebanese Naim Attallah—whom she calls Tiger—to 1998, when their marriage-like partnership finally dissolved. Originally from Fife, Erdal, a mother with two children, traveled to London to meet Tiger for work on Russian translations, an undertaking that led to their first publishing coup, Red Square. Tiger was a “bird of paradise” with the finest, rarest furnishings and clothes (“Go on, touch!” he cries. “I have only the best”) who employed a bevy of aristocratic young women in his London office. He went to any length to satisfy his considerable vanity (his style was “a lethal combination of charm and chutzpah”), and Erdal became his amanuensis. She ghostwrote everything from Tiger’s love letters to his 1,200-page Asking Questions (a series of interviews with famous women), two later novels, and a newspaper column. Her double life suited her, since she was able to carry out her duties from home in Scotland—except when her marriage broke up. Her descriptions are rich and gently humorous, especially the details about her childhood in Fife and about working holidays writing Tiger’s novels at his Dordogne country house, where she witnessed the grisly ritual of raw meat being fed to his beloved, murderous Doberman guard dogs. The nuts and bolts of the publishing enterprise are the least interesting; the extended extracts from the writers’ collaborated sex scenes are also fairly tedious. Erdal’s revelations about her Napoleonic boss refrain from nastiness, yet her coyness in refusing to name names (still!) even her new husband’s name—seems like a childish disguise. Indeed, the reader has to wonder what possessed this intelligent, gifted writer to collude in her selflessness all those years.
Still, a gracefully executed hall of mirrors.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51426-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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