The great novelist tells us what she dreams about. Between 1930 and 1936 Marguerite Yourcenar conscientiously recorded her dreams when she woke up in the morning. In 1938 she published them in France. Why? Certain obvious reasons come to mind, but they are wrong: she is not a Freudian or Jungian dream interpreter, and she thinks little of the surrealists’ enthusiasm for dreams. Yourcenar, a supremely autonomous intellectual, was seeking to explore the dreamlife on her own, without help from orthodox schools of thought. What interested her was not the universal—common to all dreamers (therefore conventional sex dreams are excluded)—but the highly individual. Consequently, one could take this book as a skeleton key to the writer’s inner self, though it might be more appropriate simply to take the book at face value. It collects a person’s nocturnal adventures. But it does so in remarkably beautiful and acute prose: “I do not, however, draw near him; I consider his solitude as a form of nudity that I have no right to spy on in secret.” “He picks up the telephone receiver and gets ready to lie the way a virtuoso prepares to play.” The pleasure of reading her strange dreams is highly literary in a way that is simultaneously sensual and intellectual. And she proposes the idea that dreams are related more closely to the processes of memory than of the imagination. This new, first-ever English translation includes not only the 1938 publication in its entirety but also Yourcenar’s substantial set of notes, mostly from the 1970s, which she made toward a planned sequel that never came to be. These notes, fragmentary as they are, are also highly engaging. The translator’s preface is verbosely academic, but the high quality of his translation redeems him. This fine and unique book could help wrest our dreamlives from the Freudians and Jungians who have colonized them: “It is not the symbol that will instruct us about man’s secrets, but what we know about the man that determines the meaning of the symbols.”
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-21289-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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