An intriguing work that transcends category, drawing from facts but reading like fiction.
In this coming-of-age memoir, a playwright illuminates the culture of the El Paso border as he perceived it when he was young.
Award-winning playwright Solis explains the genesis of his debut book before proceeding to vignettes of his formative years in a border city. First, the title, as he explains it, refers to “a devotional painting…at once visual and literary, [which] records the transgression, the divine mediation and the offering of thanks in a single frame, thus forming a kind of flash-fiction account of that person’s electrifying, life-altering event.” Thus we have a series of self-contained vignettes, though there are some connecting threads—e.g., family, the mysterious outsider boy known only as “Demon,” and the equally mysterious “Runner,” who may be running to something or from something but never stops to explain himself. Solis describes the stories as “disconnected (and yet thoroughly interconnected, noting that, through memory and reconstruction, “I’m trying to figure myself out. I’m coming to terms with who I am by looking back at what I was.” Inevitably, he deals with identity, as a boy born in America to Mexican parents, with sexual awakening, and with the first stirrings of his literary ambitions. The pieces follow a chronological progression, though with a recognition that border issues and tensions are timeless, that “there will always be those who want to come across and those who want to keep them where they are.” By the time he made his first return from college, he viewed his city, family, and origins with a totally fresh perspective. Within these pieces, he aims for a truth that he admits has been filtered through memory and shaped by selection: “I suppose I am using the poetic voice to convey the authentic.”
An intriguing work that transcends category, drawing from facts but reading like fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87286-786-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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