An elegiac work of literary archaeology by the knighted British biographer of Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey.
As the third volume of his memoirs—after Basil Street Blues (2000) and Mosaic (2004)—which similarly offer an intriguing mix of biography and autobiography (“I seek invisibility behind the subjects I am trying to bring alive on the page”), Holroyd (A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families, 2009, etc.) focuses here on the lives of two Bloomsbury-era women who were linked to the same man. Visits to the literary mecca Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, Italy, put the author on the track of a former owner of the house, an English dilettante, ex-banker, widower and Edwardian patron of the arts, Ernest Beckett turned Lord Grimthorpe, who commissioned a bust in 1901 from Rodin of Beckett’s fiancée, Eve Fairfax, only to jilt her soon after. Left with the bill, Eve nonetheless charmed the great, now-aged French sculptor, and over the next eight years their friendship flowered. The bust eventually sold (with his permission) in order to help support this intelligent, cultured woman who would remain unmarried and of scant independent means. Holroyd was able to locate Eve’s precious diary, which he calls her book of secrets, in which she accumulated autographs, photos of dear friends, scraps of poems and memories that record what she believed was a “useful” life. The other main protagonist is the legendary literary sprite, novelist and muse Violet Trefusis, Beckett's illegitimate daughter. Holroyd delved into the novels and life of Trefusis, delineating her torrid, life-transforming affair with Vita Sackville-West, and he quotes amply from their correspondence for a lively, satisfying adventure. Literary enthusiasts will delight in this lovely narrative for its own sake. Purportedly Holroyd’s “last book,” this is an elegant literary study by a seasoned biographer and wonderfully engaging writer.
Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-11558-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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