Studded with insights and with prose as elegant as that in either writer’s fiction, these letters delineate an epistolary...
The correspondence of New Yorker editor William Maxwell and poet, short-story writer, and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner.
The letters range, as Maxwell puts it, over “poetry, casuals, sculptures, and Gregorian chant.” The pair only met three times, but Maxwell edited Warner’s work for years, and their correspondence sustained them both through rough patches. We learn of Carl Van Doren’s anxieties that an installment of a great novel might be lost in the mails (this was before the days of floppy disks), of the death of old friends, of Warner’s love for Provence, of Maxwell’s regret that he did not read the Victorian novelists at a younger age. We learn about the writers’ attitudes toward religion and their opinions on bedroom fireplaces. We read Warner praising the sparing beauty of Maxwell’s prose (he wrote fiction on the side), and we learn which fictional details Maxwell likes best (in one case, a portion of oxtail stew). The letters abound in moving, heartfelt observations as simple as Maxwell’s of September 20, 1966: “Rooting in the attic,” he found five or six of Warner’s letters from the 1930s and quietly observed, “We have been writing to each other for about thirty years now.” There is precious little name-dropping, and the editor avoids excessive annotation. Steinman (English/Nassau Community College), who previously edited Maxwell’s correspondence with Frank O’Connor (The Happiness of Getting It Down Right, 1996), should also be thanked for including as an appendix Maxwell’s previously uncollected short memoir of Warner, “What You Can’t Hang Onto.” The only texts missing here are Warner’s collected works, so we could see for ourselves just how brilliant and insightful Maxwell’s notoriously brilliant and insightful editorial comments really were.
Studded with insights and with prose as elegant as that in either writer’s fiction, these letters delineate an epistolary friendship that makes 84 Charing Cross Road look dull.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-118-3
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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