Both a very uneven book and a very welcome one—a paradox Babel would have appreciated.
The tireless Charyn’s 39th book (The Green Lantern, 2004, etc.) is a feisty “biographical meditation” on the truncated career of the great Russian modernist.
Babel (1894–1940) was a Jew who grew up breathing the rich ethnic air of the Moldavanka district of the northern seaport city of Odessa. His efforts to become Russia’s Guy de Maupassant (whose stories Babel revered) were both thwarted and enriched as he was drawn into the orbits of national revolution and global war—as a correspondent and, perhaps (biographical details are unclear), a soldier and Soviet Secret Police officer—and, eventually, declared enemy of the people (once his mentor-protector, writer Maxim Gorky, was imprisoned and executed at Joseph Stalin’s order). Charyn’s approach to this ambivalent, fascinating figure—an artist sensitive to the romantic lure of violence, an unprepossessing physical specimen who collected multiple wives and mistresses—is twofold. He finds the sources of Babel’s fiction in his experiences—for example, Babel’s “attachment” to the legendary First Cavalry (manned by Cossacks renowned for their savagery), magically transposed in his 1926 masterpiece Red Cavalry. But the use of biography is haphazard. Charyn devotes disproportionate space to such ancillary matters as Babel’s supportive critics Victor Shklovsky and Lionel Trilling; memoirist Antonina Pirozhkova (whose At His Side is compared, to its detriment, with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s magisterial Hope Against Hope); and Babel’s surviving daughter Nathalie, editor of his recently published Collected Works. These emphases distract, yet Charyn’s enthusiasm for Babel’s spare, slashing prose and nightmarish intensity register strongly. And it’s never too late to rediscover this great writer’s unique admixture of brutality, peril and paradoxical beauty.
Both a very uneven book and a very welcome one—a paradox Babel would have appreciated.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-679-64306-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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