The author’s sociocultural agenda distorts a deeper understanding of the artist’s oeuvre.
Queer culture historian Elledge (Professional Writing Program/Kennesaw St. Univ.; H: Poems, 2012, etc.) provides a startling new perspective on a famous outsider artist.
A reclusive dishwasher who spent his spare time writing sprawling novels and illustrating them with vivid drawings and collages, Henry Darger (1892–1973) has inspired equal amounts of praise, derision and horror. His epic work, In the Realms of the Unreal, depicts the adventures of the Vivian Girls, a group of child warriors who retaliates against the barbaric generals who torture, rape and kill innocent children. The graphic nature of the illustrations, along with the fact that the girls often appear naked and have male genitalia, has alternately fascinated and repulsed viewers. Some historians have accused Darger of pedophilia, and others have even suggested that his obsession with the disappearance and murder of a local girl indicate that he may have killed her (her murder was never solved). Elledge takes umbrage at these accusations and makes a case for Darger as a man who had himself been the victim of sexual abuse, both in the seedy Chicago neighborhood where he grew up and in the various institutions where he lived as an adolescent after his alcoholic father abandoned him. Elledge also claims that Darger’s decadeslong relationship with William Schloeder was a romantic one, citing Darger’s own oblique journal entries as well as research on gay culture in Chicago during the early 20th century. While Elledge has clearly conducted an impressive amount of research on Darger’s milieu, the artist’s own unwillingness to specify what actually happened to him during his years of institutionalization make the author’s assertions speculative at best. He also fails to place Darger within the context of other 20th-century self-taught artists until the last few pages of the book, and he barely covers Darger’s striking use of color and composition.
The author’s sociocultural agenda distorts a deeper understanding of the artist’s oeuvre.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59020-855-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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