A poignant and poetic memoir of an American woman's life in Parma, Italy. In 1981, less than a year after her marriage to an Italian biology professor, Wilde-Menozzi (with her six-year-old daughter) followed her husband back to his native city of Parma. As a poet, short-story writer, and translator, Wilde-Menozzi is almost painfully conscious of the long and glorious tradition of expatriates who took root in Italy: The spirit of that great exile James Joyce seems, in particular, to pervade the book. In some ways, her work is reminiscent of the English writer Tim Parks, who settled in Verona and wrote Italian Neighbors (1992) and An Italian Education (1995) about his life there. But while Parks writes with ironic detachment, Wilde-Menozzi is passionate, sensuous, even fierce, whether dealing with the initial dilemma of relinquishing her freedom and following her husband to Italy (the words ``follow him,'' she writes, ``link me to all the Ruths that ever were'') or comparing her own ``bland and boring'' childhood with the chaotic intensity of her husband's family. Life, death, politics, language, art, books, food, and love commingle on the page. The author's sojourn in Italy becomes the catalyst for intensive soul-searching, which refracts off the page in marvelous images: She speaks of coffee reaching ``a noisy orgasm in the espresso pot.'' Discussing bread's centrality in Italian life, she celebrates it as ``a sacred gift''; whether it is ``fresh, stale, hanging on, filling bitter hunger, nourishing hopes, crusty and chewable,'' bread is ``sometimes all there is.'' Evocative and moving. (27 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-86547-501-6
Page Count: 373
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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