Exiled in Spain during Chile's Pinochet years, Neruda's close friend and political associate Teitelboim wrote this first major biography of the Chilean poet. Teitelboim's approach is sound on the whole. Neruda, who began to write poetry at eight and never stopped, was a force of nature, his genius an insoluble riddle. Teitelboim quotes generously from the poems and seeks their immediate source in the details of Chilean politics and Neruda's love life. He doesn't bludgeon or needle the work with textual, Freudian, or any other form of cant- ridden analysis. On the other hand, he's so close to his subject he can trip over its feet. Evoking the Chilean landscape, he sometimes writes a pale pastiche of the master. Describing the Bohemian intellectual scene of Santiago circa 1920, he drops names so freely an American reader may be bewildered. In his brief, episodic chapters, though, the savory anecdotes multiply. Neruda had a great appetite for love and friendship and the improvised life. Tales of his early stint as honorary Chilean consul in Rangoon, his years in Madrid with Garc°a Lorca, are delightful and heart-rending. If only the tone weren't so relentlessly post-Stalinist p.c. Lorca's being gay is not mentioned. Neither are the battles between anarchists and communists in the Spanish Civil War, or between Stalinists and the Trotsky circle in Mexico in the 40's. Neruda's political involvement had its ironies, not hinted at here. The result is a flattening of his complex, contradictory character in the later chapters. What does come through is the long history of American meddling in Chile, going back to the 40's. Still, Teitelboim's take on Neruda, his friend of 40 years, is unique. He knew the poet's mistress/muses when they were young and fresh. He knows them now, old, frail, and querulous. Shifting readily between vibrant past and faded present, he has written a work of elegiac charm, one that reads like a novel whose real subject, as in Neruda's beloved Proust, is the ravages wrought by passing Time.
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-292-75548-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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