Memoir as confession—a powerful, psychologically astute work of self-examination and remembrance.
The noted Danish novelist and poet delivers a rueful, self-excoriating account of a life of self-doubt, misery, and addiction.
“I do whatever I can to please him, because I’m so thankful he married me. Although I know something still isn’t quite right, I carefully avoid thinking about that.” So writes Ditlevsen in the third part of this autobiographical trilogy, written between 1969 and 1971. It’s not so much that she was dependent on the men in her life, none of them quite right for her, but instead on the drugs and alcohol that overtook her. One partner who injected her muttered that her veins were clogging up, adding, “Maybe we can find one in your foot.” Ditlevsen traces an unhappy present—much of the later narrative is set at the time of the German defeat in World War II, the streets of Denmark’s capital full of child soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms—to a childhood of discouragement (her father insisted that “a girl can’t be a poet”) and a youth in which she was convinced that she was “condemned to loneliness and anonymity.” For all the self-doubt and later chemical abuse, however, she did rise as a poet even if getting published was full of the usual roadblocks—and more, as when she writes that an editor who accepted her work “pats me on the behind, absent-mindedly and mechanically.” A rare humorous moment comes when, after drunkenly choking down a fistful of methadone pills, she asks the visiting English writer Evelyn Waugh what brought him to Denmark: “He answered that he always took trips around the world when his children were home on vacation from boarding school, because he couldn’t stand them.” Given the mostly grim revelations in her book, it’s small wonder that Ditlevsen came to an unhappy end, though not before publishing some of the most memorable works in modern Danish literature.
Memoir as confession—a powerful, psychologically astute work of self-examination and remembrance.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-3746-0239-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
SEEN & HEARD
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