Deft and stylish.
A Swedish writer and poet well known in her native land makes her U.S. debut with a serenely ironic memoir about life in a small Breton town.
In 2000, 55-year-old Malmsten took her Swedish pension and headed south from central Norrland on the trans-European motorway to find a new life. She carried little with her except a love of history and a sense of social justice, qualities evident throughout these delightfully meandering reflections. Somewhere near Brest, in France, Malmsten discovered a parcel of paradise “where the land comes to an end in Europe—fin des terres, finis terrae—Finistère” and proceeded to dig in. She gradually fashioned an elaborate garden (despite the high price of water) with the help of gardening books in several languages, plans she drew up herself and well-meaning neighbors eager to dispense advice. One important daily visitor was the exquisitely elegant widow Madame C, who gently corrected the author’s French-in-progress and first planted the idea of writing a book about Finistère. The author reflects here on the advantages and disadvantages of being a stranger. She describes the Swedish welfare state and a maddening confrontation with the Social Insurance Office (dubbed by its victims “the Social Insulting Office”) that led to her emigration. She portrays the family members who have shaped her character: Grandma, who had large hands and a beautiful peony garden, and Malmsten’s privileged father, who joined the international socialist organization Clarté in the 1930s. The author shared his principles enough to abruptly break with Monsieur Le R, a fellow gardener and admirer, when he revealed a racist nature. Yet in her text she expresses both admiration and revulsion for Sultan Mehmet of Istanbul, a brutal dictator but a gorgeous gardener. No matter how serious her reflections, Malmsten always delivers them with a light touch, and she’s perfectly willing to laugh at herself, especially when recounting hilarious faux pas in her adopted language.
Deft and stylish.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-84343-164-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvill UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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