A candid portrayal of wartime privations is followed by a blur of unexamined events.
The grandson of artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) recalls his adolescence in Nazi-occupied France.
Most of Matisse’s debut memoir focuses on his experiences during World War II, when he abetted his father’s underground missions; attended schools where he suffered from lice, bullies, and censorious administrators; and nearly starved on meager food rations. In Paris, he sometimes got vitamin cookies from the Red Cross, donated by American Quakers. His clothing was “a hodgepodge of hand-me-downs” that he quickly outgrew. For the most part, the author captures his teenage voice and perspective, imbuing the memoir with the tone of a picaresque novel. He portrays himself as daring, sassy, and curious. His curiosity makes all the more unbelievable the mystery at the heart of the book: the missing Matisse of the title, it turns out, is not one of his grandfather’s paintings but the author’s identity. When he was 12, before enrolling him in a boarding school, his mother told him that he was to be known by another surname, not Matisse, adding no explanation. Nor did the author ask about this sudden change even though he forthrightly asked about much else. He wondered if he was really the son of the man he called Papa, whom he respected and loved. After the vivid chapters that take place during the war, the narrative loses momentum. While living in Normandy, Matisse learned that his parents divorced, which shocked him, but his mother offered little explanation. A few weeks later he got word that his mother was dying, destitute, in a run-down hospital, an incredible fate for the daughter-in-law of France’s most famous artist. But again, there was no explanation. Inexplicably estranged from his once-adored Papa, Matisse, married, moved to Canada and later the United States. He divorced three times and finally met the love of his life.
A candid portrayal of wartime privations is followed by a blur of unexamined events.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1496413833
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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