An amusing, albeit too tightly condensed look at clues to Proust’s treatment of style, memory and homosexuality.
Literary biographer Muhlstein, whose previous work charmingly explored how Balzac used food in his novels (Balzac’s Omelette, 2011), mines the territory of Proust’s literary influences, such as Racine and Anatole France. In Racine’s audacious grammar, Muhlstein notes, Proust learned that “an original writer was entitled to stray from strict rules of syntax but was bound to respect scrupulously the precise meanings of words.” Proust acknowledged that he gleaned the idea of the evocative madeleine from a passage in Francois de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, in which the narrator is roused by the “magic sound” of the warbling thrush to recall the estate of his father. Muhlstein also emphasizes Proust’s debt to Anglo-Saxon writers, especially Ruskin, whom Proust apparently spent nine years studying and translating, largely thanks to his mother, who was fluent in English. Proust admired Ruskin’s “exquisitely minute descriptions” and a kind of organic order that helped Proust understand how to give a proper form to his own towering novelistic structure. In his character Baron de Charlus, the homosexual aristocrat, Proust consolidated much of his reading in Balzac, Saint-Simon and Madame de Sevigne, while Proust imbued his character Bergotte, the writer, with his young-adult adulation for novelist France. Muhlstein has evidently read and absorbed Proust and his influences deeply, but some readers may wonder why she does not employ Lydia Davis’ fresh new translation of Proust’s work rather than the dated Moncrieff-Kilmartin edition. A mostly stimulating study that should deepen readers' appreciation of Proust and draw them back to the original “underpinning.”
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59051-566-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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
SEEN & HEARD
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