More verbal onanism in the fourth and last installment of A Journal of Love, which demonstrates that even an unexpurgated diary can be boring (especially sans the high prurience quotient of the scandalous couplings in the earlier volumes Incest and Henry and June). This time the players are Henry (Miller, still) and Gonzalo MorÇ, a passionate Peruvian, in a dÇdoublement on which Nin positively mainlines, intoxicated by the audacity and the risk of keeping them both (and keeping them apart from each other . . . and the others). Keep them she does, on a seemingly endless shoestring provided by cipher-husband Hugh Guiler, and also by their various consorts (mostly Art in Miller's case, Communism and Helba [platonic by now] in Gonzalo's). ``I nurture their egotism,'' Nin interprets grandly, though she doesn't shrink from cataloguing her outlay of francs-per-month-per-man for food and rent. Her vague dream-picaresque purveys little actual narrative; Nin writes to evade the demons of solitude, in swirls of preoccupation with herself in all of her sacrificial, sensual, and poetic wonder (``I know I have as great an ear for nuances as Proust . . .''). Jealousy—of her lovers' lovers, past and prospective—is the ``disease'' she admits to, however, as she communes with her diary. Breathlessly: ``I feel a malaise until I write certain things down. . . . Deliverance!'' Therapy, then, conducted by a virtuoso solipsist in an airless crucible of amour-propre.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100089-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
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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