Vera is one of the freshest, most evocative prose writers since Ondaatje, her sophisticated lyricism offering a poised...
Two early novels showing the mesmerizing poeticism of Zimbabwean Vera (Butterfly Burning, 2000), this time in the lives and fortunes of two young women seeking a measure of solace in a war-torn, poverty-ridden, yet naturally beautiful land.
In the more compelling Without a Name (1994), Mazvitza is presented in brief episodic chapters, and the rhythms of the prose—dense, lyric, modestly mythic—lend themselves to the savoring that such short chapters allow. The story is simple: Mazvitza first meets and falls in love with a local village man, Nyenyedzi, but, in search of a vague “freedom,” travels by bus to Harare, the “big city” she has never glimpsed. There, she is taken in by Joel, who offers a sort of safety amid Harare’s flagrant decay, despair, and delight. Joel—intriguing, with a startling quickness about him—soon impregnates, and then discards, Mazvita, who finds herself and her unnamed child alone. In the prizewinning Under the Tongue (1996), Vera offers a more robust plot in the story of how young Zhizha came to find herself in the dreamy residence of her grandmother, her father dead and her mother dying beside her. Zhizha’s father, Muroyiwa, grew up the son of a blind man whose first son went off to fight in the omnipresent “war,” leaving Muroyiwa self-consciously behind. Vera’s prose is delicately engaging as she describes Muroyiwa’s butterfly-hunting trips to the mountains, one of the few bright spots in an otherwise emptying tale of incest and abuse. Zhizha’s mother, Runyararo, a ghostly presence sunk deeply into her illness, is recalled teaching the girl English and celebrating the return of local soldiers from the war. At the close is a surreal recollection of Muroyiwa’s violation of his girl.
Vera is one of the freshest, most evocative prose writers since Ondaatje, her sophisticated lyricism offering a poised tension as it details shattered landscapes, bodies, and dreams.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-53816-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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