An unusual perspective illuminates a much written-about author.
A biography of George Orwell (1903-1950) based on his “obsessive relationship with smell.”
Having recently lost his sense of smell, Sutherland (Emeritus, English/Univ. College, London; A Little History of Literature, 2013, etc.) noticed that Orwell was hypersensitive to odors and loved the smell of farmyard animals and other “uplifting natural smells.” Although Sutherland asserts that it is possible to trace “scent narratives” in Orwell’s fiction, his “nasocriticism” rarely fulfills that project. Instead, Sutherland offers a brisk biographical overview, drawing in part from previous biographies that he admires: Bernard Crick’s, authorized by Orwell’s widow (1980), and later works by D.J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker, both published in 2003. Sutherland’s Orwell is awkward, cynical, and generally unsympathetic. He was a bright student, winning a scholarship to a prestigious prep school, and then went on to Eton, where he met two influential and wealthy young men who helped him to get published; one “immensely and discretely” supported him as he lay dying of tuberculosis. Poverty was a consistent theme in Orwell’s life and work. Sutherland does not dispute rumors that Orwell was a “flagellophile” who derived “a fetishized sexual thrill from the whip and being whipped,” nor that he went to Burma (“the biggest brothel in the Empire”) for sex; nor that he was attracted by “the androgynous beauty of the dominant Burmese race.” As a young man, he botched his relationship with a girlfriend by nearly raping her as they walked through the countryside, a landscape that Orwell found “wildly aphrodisiac.” When he finally married, in 1936, his mother told his new wife that she must be “a brave girl” to marry her son. The couple lived in an “uncomfortably primitive” house in a remote village, where they tried to farm. Sutherland offers three “smell narratives” as appendices, but, otherwise, few odors waft through the book.
An unusual perspective illuminates a much written-about author.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78023-648-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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