Connoisseurs of literary memoir will enjoy Jarre's precise way of capturing emotional experiences.
Midcentury European novelist Jarre (1925-2016) recalls the lifetime of dislocations that formed her changing sense of self.
Originally published in Italy in 1987, the book is translated by Goldstein, known for her work on Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. Jarre’s memoir opens with Goldstein's comments and a critical introduction by Marta Barone, who is overseeing the reissue of Jarre's works in Italian, hoping to restore her to "her rightful place in Italian literature." Barone aptly characterizes the author's virtues in this lament: "Why have her extraordinary novels and her unique voice, cool and searching, yet ironic, tender, brutal, and astonishingly attentive to life and its details—why has all this, all together, not endured?" The memoir is divided into three parts: childhood, adolescence, marriage and motherhood. Born in Riga, Latvia, Jarre and her sister moved to Italy with their mother after their parents split up (her Jewish father later died in the Holocaust). They lived with their French-speaking, Protestant grandparents outside then-fascist Turin. Jarre shows how her writerly perspective emerged with this first dislocation. "Time entered my life when I arrived in Torre Pellice with my sister,” she writes. “It gave me for the first time a past…the story of my childhood was what remained to me of my preceding existence, since in the space of a few weeks I changed country, language, and family circle." She goes on to describe the herb garden that her mother planted in their new home. One of the throughlines of the book is Jarre’s difficult relationship with her seemingly cold mother. In the third section, in which she wrestles with the writing of this memoir, we see the two conferring about the details of that very passage. Like Nabokov's Speak, Memory, this book is more concerned with time and perspective than narrative storytelling, though Jarre is more like Ferrante in her lack of nostalgia and unflinching focus on the difficulties of relationships.
Connoisseurs of literary memoir will enjoy Jarre's precise way of capturing emotional experiences.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-939931-94-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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