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Occasionally overwritten but powerfully provocative memoir about death and drugs that is likely to attract a lot of attention.
A gifted young composer who insists that he’s “not really a writer” Cody was diagnosed with a malignant cancer that required a bone marrow transplant following six months of chemotherapy (“you’ll go through it too, almost certainly,” he writes of the chemo. “It’s part of life in the twenty-first century”). With medical expectation suggesting that he would not survive, he became involved with a series of women—romantically or sexually, often drug-fueled—in a narrative that would be deemed implausible were this fiction. The strangest woman who has the strongest hold on him also happened to be the doctor through his bone marrow transplant, an “emotionally unstable” partner who ended their relationship rather than face his death. Yet, as the author admits, “the morphine acted as the classic unreliable narrator,” as dreams and the drugs that induced them pervade the narrative, occasionally leaving readers to ponder the distinction between real life and the reality of what the author experienced in his mind. There are also extended analyses of the relationship between art and life—he’s as absorbed with Paul Klee and Ezra Pound as he is with the Rolling Stones and David Foster Wallace—and attempts to render aesthetics as algebraic equations. Some of the writing is maddeningly glib: “Times change, as Cole Porter and Eliot and the Byrds and those guys who wrote the Bible knew so well.” Some shows flashes of deep insight: “What else, after all, is creativity, if not self-permission to get something wrong, in order to subsequently reorder that something to get it right.” Ultimately, reader frustration will resolve amid the wild swings of mind and mood that the narrative captures, as the diversions of the Manhattan club circuit provide small distraction from the hard truths of mortality. A celebration of the senses, the arts and life itself, within what the author terms “a story about God and vomiting.”
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-08106-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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