This fascinating family chronicle brings Yourcenar's multifarious abilities as an imaginative and erudite historian, vivid memoirist, and observant novelist to bear on her father's family, the Flemish Cleenewercks, or ``Do-littles.'' In the second of three volumes of her family chronicles (the first, Dear Departed, 1991, portrayed her mother's family), Yourcenar's (190387) narrative begins in prehistory with a mixture of high lyricism and subjective anthropology and progressively molds itself around the Roman and Christian invasions of Celtic Gaul. Out of this rich but anonymous background, her first identifiable paternal relatives emerge in the Middle Agesthe Cleenewercks and the Bieswals, minor Flemish nobility, with a recessive trait for soldiery and religion, and a strong legal gene. The law provides Yourcenar with a partial storybook—two 17th-century ancestors who judged a witch, for example, give her an excellent social and psychological opportunity—but her sharpest characterizations, of not only forebears but their times too, come from surviving portraits, including two ancestresses married to and painted by Rubens. By the 19th century, this historical memoir takes on Balzacian dimensions and Proustian overtones with the lives of Yourcenar's grandfather, Michel-Charles Cleenewerck de Crayencour, a civil servant perpetually on the wrong side of contemporary French politics and his philistine wife; and her father, Michel, a rebellious young man destined for exile. Yourcenar intimately reconstructs and retells their lives with both sympathy and irony. She revivifies her grandfather's wooden memoir, which includes an account of a notorious railway disaster outside Versailles, infusing it with her own sly observations, and rejoins her father's fragmentary anecdotes and casual disclosures about his wayward life. Sensitive to both the psychological and the historical, with an eye to fate and character, How Many Years is Yourcenar's family album for the ages. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-17319-2
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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