Delightful prose and steady observations distinguish this thoughtful narrative of a complex life.
Green’s literary reputation may have lost some luster in the half-century since his last publication, but Treglown (English/Univ. of Warwick) restores its brightness in a lucid and captivating biography.
From 1926 to 1952, English industrialist Henry Yorke (1905–73) published (under his pseudonym) a collection of tersely titled social comedies (e.g., Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting) whose pleasant façades masked some very dark undercurrents. Treglown dashes between Henry Green’s novels and Henry Yorke’s life, finding autobiographical illuminations in the world of fiction. Although such a practice is often mired in wild conjecture and improbable flights of fancy, a steady eye to historical fact provides a sturdy and trustworthy framework for the author’s analysis. The fine dividing line between pseudonymous author and aristocratic industrialist demands Treglown’s detailed attention to such matters as Yorke’s school years and married life so that he can ascertain the ways these experiences pop up in Green’s fiction. At the same time, the biographer judiciously yet generously allows his subject to speak directly in quotes that range from deploring the constraints of travel (“It interferes with my masturbation”) to hinting at indiscretions (“I’m taking your wife to a nightclub and I’ll bring her back probably in tatters in the morning”). The ambivalences and ambiguities voiced in these passages assist Treglown in delineating the many facets of a man often at odds with the life he lived, as when he somberly confesses, “Am very depressed, lonely & overworked.” Terry Southern once said that there are writers and writers’ writers, but that Green was a writers’ writers’ writer. Muddling through that obfuscatory compliment may be a challenge, but Treglown gives ample evidence of its accuracy.
Delightful prose and steady observations distinguish this thoughtful narrative of a complex life.Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-43303-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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