A fine-grained, scholarly exhumation of the buried cultural and especially medical lore that helped shape Kafka's conflicted self-understanding as a Jew in turn-of-the-century Austria and Czechoslovakia. Gilman (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1986, etc.) seeks to reconstruct the lost ``discourses'' of race, gender, and disease in Kafka's time. He argues that Kafka's anxieties about his Jewish identity stem directly from his anxieties about his body and its infirmities, both real and imaginary. Always underweight, nervous, and much inclined to heed the health fads of his day, Kafka fretted a great deal over his health. Then, as if in fulfillment of his expectations, he got really sick. In 1917 he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him in 1924. Kafka regarded his disease as the bodily expression of some deeper spiritual malady. Gilman sensibly proposes that the writer had internalized medical and popular anti-Semitic myths about a supposedly inbred genetic legacy that predisposed Jews to certain illnesses (especially syphilis and tuberculosis) and resulted in what was thought to be the degenerate feminization of European culture at the end of the 19th century. Jewish men in particular, supposedly less robust than their virile ``Aryan'' counterparts, were thought to embody a somatic decline into sickly effeminacy. This general picture of Kafka's own self- understanding is not new. What Gilman offers in the way of fresh insight is a wealth of concrete detail from the prevailing (mis)conceptions of the time's learned and not-so-learned culture. However, Gilman is unable to parlay his deepened understanding of the cultural background into new or revealing readings of Kafka's texts. A work as central to the Kafka canon as The Castle, for example, is dealt with on a single page, which contends vaguely that the novel's setting may have something to do with tuberculosis spas of the day. Excellent, often engrossing as cultural history; disappointing as literary criticism. (illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-415-91177-X
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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