Occasionally meandering, but possessing a quiet authority and subtle emotional power.
A gloomy memoir of growing up amid harsh conditions in rural Ireland.
Born in 1934, novelist McGahern (By the Lake, 2002, etc.) traces his childhood in and around Leitrim, a central lake town at the base of the Iron Mountains where the soil is extremely poor and life rather grim and joyless. Early on, he and his three sisters (more siblings arrived later) lived with their paternal grandmother and mother in Ballinamore, while their father, a former IRA member now serving as a sergeant in the army, was stationed at the barracks 20 miles away in Cootehall. Young Sean, as the boy was known, clung to his gentle mother, Sue, a schoolteacher. Although she never beat her children, she couldn’t protect them from the occasional explosive brutality of their willful, handsome father or the routine canings received at the hands of schoolmistresses. At the base of the violence tolerated by this deeply Catholic society, asserts McGahern, “was sexual sickness and frustration”: Sex was deemed unclean, and the division between body and soul firmly demarcated. After their mother died of cancer, ten-year-old Sean and his siblings lived at the whim of their coldly calculating father. The children drew together for survival, scrambling to educate themselves and then get away from home. Sean was accepted at a teachers’ training college in Dublin closely associated with the Church, which assured him of a good job at a time when many Irish people were forced to find employment in Britain or abroad. His father gradually declined in mental and physical health just as Sean’s literary star was rising; his first novel, The Barracks, won the AE Memorial Award in 1963. After he married, the author moved back to Leitrim, mostly as a gesture toward the memory of his beloved mother.
Occasionally meandering, but possessing a quiet authority and subtle emotional power.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4496-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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