Crass, callous, sordid and cynical—thus, utterly true to the spirit of Dalí and a certain bestseller. Already in the works,...
Melting clock of a memoir about the author’s experiences selling Dalí works—some authentic, many not—during those heady recent decades when the merest splatter or signature attributed to the Spanish artist was as hot as a subprime mortgage.
He’s telling things the way he remembers them, declares convicted Belgian conman turned author Lauryssens (The Man Who Invented the Third Reich, 1999, etc.). Freeing himself from the troublesome bonds of fact by acknowledging that his myriad pages of dialogue are “recreated,” he presents his life on an impressive platter, apparently hoping that readers will attend to the fine china rather than the rancid meat it holds. If the author is to be trusted (beware: He conned buyers virtually to the end), he was plucked as a young man from a cheese factory to be a Hollywood reporter for Panorama, a Belgian weekly. He never went to California; instead, he fabricated stories, including an apocryphal interview with Dalí that launched him onto the fast lane of the fine-art freeway. Working for a man with the ethics of a starving predator, Lauryssens was soon passing himself off as a Dalí authority and making major bucks in numerous art swindles. The gullible arrived like eager sheep, according to the author, who writes fondly of the lavish lifestyle they enabled him to enjoy. He jetted about and stayed in multistar hotels. He married a nice woman; it didn’t last. He sired some children, professing to love them as he was hauled off to jail. He found himself in the circle of Dalí intimates, who shared with him their stories of rampant forgery and the artist’s notorious sex circuses. Readers beware: The language is explicit in this wild and woolly account; we learn what devices were put into which people under what conditions.
Crass, callous, sordid and cynical—thus, utterly true to the spirit of Dalí and a certain bestseller. Already in the works, a film with Al Pacino and Cillian Murphy: scary.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37993-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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