An extended interview with the author of Interview with the Vampire (1976), etc., conducted by an old friend who wishes to display ``how much fun she is to talk to, how interesting and thoughtful, how candid, how honest and even brave.'' Though autobiography is touched on—Rice's Catholic girlhood, her rebellious early marriage to an atheistic poet, her daughter's death from leukemia, the disaffected return from San Francisco to funky New Orleans, her kind of town—the emphasis of these near- monologues is on Rice's fluctuating inner state and her emotional involvement with her work. Fascinated as only the initially repressed can be by what she calls ``transgressive'' fiction, Rice explains how writing pornography under pseudonyms freed her to find the unique Rice voice and unify all her recent novels—whether about vampires, witches, or demons—into the Rice ``world'' or ``franchise,'' in which her many, many admirers take a proprietary interest. Though a reader of Flaubert and Yeats and a devourer of religious history, Rice endearingly states that she has ``never been a sophisticated writer'' and indeed that intellectuals can be ``rather merciless people.'' She continues to resent negative reviews but finds validation in a popularity that ranges ``from teenagers . . . to truck drivers'' and includes fans who tend to a neo-Victorian, S&M aesthetic. Though not foolish when it comes to dealing with publishers and filmmakers—her lengthily described duelling match with Hollywood on the way to filming Interview could try the patience of the undead—it is true that Rice's obsession with the configurations of sex, power, and violence partake of a self-regarding naivetÇ, an almost militant lack of irony, that inflames both her friends and her enemies. It is the source, that is, both of mass love and not inconsiderable dislike. Riley lets Rice have her say. The result is essential for aficionados and basic homework for any critic.
Pub Date: May 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-345-39636-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
