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LITERATURE OR LIFE

A moving account of life in Buchenwald and a subsequent lifetime spent trying to write about it, by the Spanish novelist and screenwriter best known for his classic filmscripts (Z, La Guerre Est Finie) and a previous nonfiction account of his ordeal (The Long Voyage, 1964). Semprun was a 20-year-old philosophy student and a member of the French Resistance when he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and incarcerated. After 18 months in Buchenwald, he was freed by American troops—and thereafter endured almost a half-century of vacillation between variously failed attempts at capturing his experiences in ``literature'' (unable to span ``the insurmountable gulf between what you envision and its narrative realization'') and equally painful efforts to shrug off that burden. Circling back and forth among various past times and the present, Semprun creates a discursive and dramatic mosaic in which ruminations about his obligations as a survivor and struggles as a writer alternate with memories of encounters in the camp (with dying comrades, a young Russian ``barbarian'' who worked as an orderly, and a Jewish- American lieutenant who was one of his ``liberators,'' among others); relationships with literary friends and sympathetic lovers before and after the war; and—always—discussions of books and writers that influenced him profoundly (for example, Kafka's letters to his fiancÇe Milena JesenskÖ—who outlived him only to die in a concentration camp). Initially, Semprun's confession of his inability to sort out and write about such matters feels contrived, but the book gathers both internal logic and emotional power as it proceeds. In the concluding pages, in which Semprun learns from the suicide of fellow Holocaust victim Primo Levi that he too is mortal and must finish his work, and his discovery, during a return visit to Buchenwald in 1992, of the clerical error that undoubtedly saved his life, triumphantly justify his ``novel's'' long genesis and circuitous structure. A masterly work, and the obvious capstone of Semprun's distinguished career.

Pub Date: March 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-670-87288-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997

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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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