An atmospheric description of life in Belgrade, notwithstanding a few stylistic failings.
Radovic’s (Vuka: Destination Alaska, 2016) memoir tells the story of five boys growing up in mid-20th-century Yugoslavia.
This remembrance opens on Sept. 6, 1965, when the author enrolled at the First Belgrade Gymnasium, a school situated in the capital of what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He soon bonded with four other boys: Serge, Zee, Jo, and Dee. Together, they formed a tight group called the Belgrade Five. The memoir chronicles two years of their lives together, which, in certain respects, reflect the lives of most teenage boys, punctuated by school pranks, soccer, and a burning desire for the opposite sex. What makes this book engaging is its setting: a country that the author describes in a preface as a place that “no longer exists” and “belonged more to the East than to the West, but mostly to itself.” The author captures beautifully what it meant to be a teenager in 1960s Belgrade, including the minute details of daily life in the kafana (a type of bistro): “smoke-filled, and desolate…a pressurized beer dispenser and several spherical spittoons on stands.” Yet there’s also the pull of Western culture: the author had a significant collection of rock records, ranging from the Beatles to the Shadows; “The best rock groups are British,” he told Jo. However, despite successfully capturing a unique moment in European history, this memoir fails to establish distinct identities for the boys, and it’s therefore difficult to follow their individual plights. This is compounded by the flat dialogue, which doesn’t modulate from character to character and often seems textbooklike, as when Jo discusses a soccer team: “Their coach Arribas insists on one-touch offensive and collective play called jeu a la Nantaise, without excessive dribbling or possession.” But although the staccato dialogue lacks the fluidity of true conversation, it doesn’t negate the book’s overall appeal. It’s still a passionate love letter to a city, a school, and a group of close friends, and it will attract readers with even a vague interest in Eastern European cities of the pre-perestroika era.
An atmospheric description of life in Belgrade, notwithstanding a few stylistic failings.Pub Date: June 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-9707-5
Page Count: 246
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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