DeSalvo (Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, 1989) demonstrates that when the act of creation is also one of revenge, the primal ooze of literature can be extremely foul. But her project begs the underlying question for literary criticism of the relation between a writer's life and work. DeSalvo examines four authors who turned family and friends into characters in their fiction. Before Leonard and Virginia Woolf's marriage settled into an exemplary working partnership, it went through a poisonous phase; he published The Wise Virgins, which attacked the way Virginia ``looked, talked, and thought,'' satirized and rewrote scenes from her novel The Voyage Out, and fictionally erased their marriage when the ``Leonard'' character decided not to marry the ``Virginia'' character. When D.H. Lawrence became disenchanted with his friend Lady Ottoline Morell, he created a contemptuous portrait of her as Women in Love's Hermione Rodrice. Although Bloomsbury gossips (and his wife, Frieda, whose dislike for Ottoline was returned in kind) were delighted, Ottoline was crushed and humiliated. During the first 18 years of her life Djuna Barnes had no contact with people outside her family, which, DeSalvo reports, practiced incest, ritual rape, group sex, spirit possession, bestiality, and forced voyeurism. Although her early works referred obliquely to these events, it was not until her mother died that Barnes penned her most autobiographical work, The Antiphon, exploring the horrors inflicted on children by their own parents. Henry Miller's obsession with his dark muse and second wife, June (and her insistence that a former Western Union clerk could become a writer), dragged them through an emotionally explosive and mutually exploitative relationship during which her work as a prostitute barely maintained them in grinding poverty. A work that reveals a disturbing fascination with the rottenness at the core of some literature and delivers it with the relish of a tabloid.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93899-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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