Informative and absorbing, but it’s not the whole story.
The complexities of emigration and cultural adaptation, as well as the corrosive effects of an embattled career, are precisely traced in Conrad scholar Stape’s rigorously compressed biography.
The various stages in the peripatetic life of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857–1924) included his birth in Poland, upbringing there and in Russia, successful tenures as a world-traveling captain in the British Merchant Navy and residence in England, where he became a master of narrative art since renowned as one of the avatars of literary modernism. The strength of Stape’s meticulous chronicle is the clarity with which it illuminates this unhappy genius’s vanity, financial irresponsibility, hypochondria and enervating family life. (Wife Jessie was plagued by recurring grave health problems, and eldest son Borys was a profligate, weak-willed underachiever.) Stape writes convincingly of Conrad’s relationships with contemporary artists, celebrities and miscellaneous influential persons. Some, notably his encouraging editor Edward Garnett, were cherished friends; others, including novelists John Galsworthy and Conrad’s sometime collaborator Ford Madox Ford, were resources to be exploited. We learn a good deal about the provenance of such masterpieces as Lord Jim, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness and The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” But Stape’s decision to eschew analysis of these works misses opportunities to support his eloquent summary assertion that “Conrad speaks for an awareness of fragmentation so quintessentially modern that his voice…remains powerful and authoritative.” Indeed it does, but the real proof of Conrad’s importance resides in the complex structures and layered ambiguities of his portrayals of adventurers and exiles adrift in unfamiliar worlds—not in a sedulous accounting of their author’s often frantic efforts to keep his foundering career and reputation afloat.
Informative and absorbing, but it’s not the whole story.Pub Date: March 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4449-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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