In this occasionally overwrought but often moving memoir, Boelte ends with a different perspective than when he started.
An extended meditation on fog, perception, memory and mortality.
This debut is even more ambitious than it is elliptical, as Boelte tries to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother when both were teenagers and with the nature of fog, both as a physical manifestation and as a metaphor. He compares memory to fog in “how it obscures the world, confusing the seen and the unseen. And then, how it slowly disappears from sight until the world is once again visible.” The prose can be a little too preciously poetic, overly conscious of its effect, but the narrative has a powerful anchor amid the mists of fog—the brother who committed suicide, perhaps in response to the LSD he had been using and then caught dealing, half a lifetime ago for the author. There’s a catharsis within this narrative strand, as the author remembers what he had previously blocked and comes to terms with what was once familiar but has been lost in the fog of memory. There is little in the way of chronological progression, as the story jumps back and forth among the fog-bound present in San Francisco, the coming-of-age (and death) in Colorado, and the legacy of fog in the historical annals. The metaphor almost collapses under the thematic strain, but just as it seems that Boelte has circled back a time or two too many, he shows that he knows what he’s doing, evoking the philosophy of the great painter Mark Rothko: “If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again—exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it.”
In this occasionally overwrought but often moving memoir, Boelte ends with a different perspective than when he started.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1619024588
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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