Antarctica is not so much a destination as a symptom in this intense, disturbing memoir of a wickedly unpleasant childhood. Novelist Diski (Monkey’s Uncle, 1995 etc.) doesn’t like to travel, doesn’t like breaks in routine—“indolence has always been my most essential quality”—but an undeniable urge to visit Antarctica swept her along. What draws her is the land’s white oblivion, the solitude and stillness, where little distracts the eye from the emptiness. There is safety in that blank reality and its unbroken whiteness, the same safety Diski found in the white hospital sheets that swaddled her during an extended stay at a psychiatric hospital, where a bout of bone-cracking depression sent her. As she makes her tetchy way south, she reveals a dismal childhood with wretched parents, episodes of abandonment and running away and attempted suicide. It’s hard to imagine a more miserable experience and easy to understand why Diski never saw her mother again after she was 19 years old. Now Diski’s daughter wants to discover her grandmother’s fate, which sends Diski pawing through the ashes—and sailing to Antarctica. Her observations of her shipmates and the landscape are by turns droll, acidic, and closely detailed, the writing is spare, her intelligence bright and quirky. She visits outposts that are pearls of desolation, marvels at the ghostly passing of icebergs, and, always the resistant traveler, even considers not going ashore when the boat reaches its goal: “It’s not the arriving but the not-arriving . . . it’s not the seeing of the whales, but the possibility of choosing not to see them.” Been there, haven’t done that. “I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is colored white and filled with a singing silence.” Diski’s Antarctica-of-the-mind is such a place.
Pub Date: Aug. 27, 1998
ISBN: 0-88001-603-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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