A heartfelt story that tackles grief through an honest, powerful lens.
Jourdan’s background as a musician and translator comes through in a gripping debut memoir about his mother.
In raw, lyrical prose, Jourdan deftly renders the worlds he lived in. After growing up in Portugal but leaving to attend boarding school, Jourdan and his sister travel back to Portugal to see their mother in the hospital. They don’t know the particulars of what happened, only that it’s serious; their father told them to prepare for the worst. Jourdan’s mother dies shortly after they arrive, and Jourdan spends the rest of his visit in her home, trying to discover more about the woman whom he adored to the point of idealization. He develops the “mystical” side of loving a parent, not just “psychoanalysis’s scientific pretenses.” Jourdan uses his upbringing to capture his mother as “an object.” She was fiercely loyal, intelligent, gentle and kind—all qualities that allowed her to help Jourdan when he suffered several psychotic breakdowns. A skilled writer with a sharp voice, the author establishes his perspective from the start: “Why shouldn’t the Oedipal situation happen much later than it was once fashionable to suppose?” Readers may also be startled to find a list of grievances the author has against a variety of people, from those who knew his mother to her doctors to her former lovers to a large woman—a “cunt”—he saw at the park while dog-walking as a teenager. The purpose of this rant is not entirely clear. It undermines the connection the reader feels with the mother—a connection Jourdan establishes beautifully in the rest of the book. “Dear everybody who loved my mother: I know. It’s sad and it’s a tragedy,” he writes. “I know, so please stop saying it.”
A heartfelt story that tackles grief through an honest, powerful lens.Pub Date: May 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1780992648
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Zero Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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