Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing...
Breathless, halting memoir in fragments by the English stylist, friend and biographer of Aldous Huxley, and late-blooming novelist.
Bedford begins in the middle of her life, in 1953, when she’s in her early 40s, meandering happily in Switzerland and savoring the publication of her first novel. By fits and starts, she then moves back in time, noting that in Italy after WWII, on the island of Ischia, when she was 36, she and her journalist friend Martha Gellhorn (post-Hemingway) ran into an old family acquaintance, the so-called “Kraut Baronessa,” who had married a German diplomat and worked on the “wrong side” of the war (friendly with Franco, among others); seeing her evokes the Italian aristocratic milieu of Bedford’s mother, who left her husband and remarried a handsome Italian, Alessandro, and would summon her daughter, living in the English Midlands, to spend the summers with her. Gradually, the full story emerges: Bedford’s loafing Monte Carlo collector father and wealthy, fickle mother raised her for a spell at a grand country house in the southwest corner of Germany before separating to glamorous far-flung regions; eventually, the nearly illiterate daughter ran away from home to find her married half-sister, Jacko, in Rome. Despite her lack of formal education, young Bedford wanted to be a writer, and composed several unpublished novels before her middle-aged coup, all the while journeying across Europe and Mexico with friends such as her mentor Pierre Mimerel, a social philosopher, and Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, who orchestrated Bedford’s hasty marriage to one of their “bugger friends” in order to secure an English passport. It’s a shifting, erratic journey through the century, most affecting when Bedford halts to describe her mother’s descent into morphine addiction, while the 20 later years, living in sunny climes with American Eda Lord, are dismissed in a paragraph.
Waiting for the next installment of Bedford’s “siren song of the daily round.” (Meanwhile, Counterpoint will be reissuing her nine other works.)Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-169-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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