A thought-provoking volume, all the more memorable for being unapologetic.
One man’s frank appraisal of his life as a sadomasochist.
Before he’s ten paragraphs into his memoir of lust, pain and sexual perversion, Marten invokes the Marquis de Sade, whose epic ramblings on those same subjects made him the scandal of his time and an enduring object of fascination to this day. The invocation is a daring gambit (de Sade had considerable literary talent) and Marten’s narrative does share two qualities with his prototype—it’s utterly unflinching and it’s incredibly lively. Marten outlines the development of his sexual fascinations—he’s aroused by pain and likes to hurt his sex partners—from childhood, when encyclopedia illustrations prompted his first sadomasochistic imaginings; through fraternity life at college, where self-bondage was as close as he could get to the real thing; into the dating scene, with often hilarious results; and, in the book’s strongest, most heartfelt passages, through the early joys and eventual breakdown of his marriage. Marten’s wife, Rachel, is initially an enthusiastic participant in his fantasies, but once their novelty wears off for her, a void opens in their relationship. Marten chronicles it with an absorbing lack of self-pity: “I had once seen Rachel as a doorway to possibility, but now she’d become my jailer” (he consistently refers to women who disappoint him—including his mother—as his “jailers”). Marten’s unspoken insistence that, bedroom preferences notwithstanding, he is a likable and even decent guy runs throughout the book, putting a refreshingly human face on sexual behaviors most people dismiss as sordid and criminal. Unlike the infamous Marquis, all of Marten’s partners were consensual.
A thought-provoking volume, all the more memorable for being unapologetic.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-4306-0
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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