Either way, This I Believe is full of pleasures. Whatever their setting, the most memorable of these pieces ably show why...
An autumn-of-life exercise in taking stock by the renowned Mexican novelist and essayist (Inez, 2002, etc.).
“I believe in Balzac,” writes Fuentes. “Next to Cervantes and Faulkner, he is the novelist who has influenced me the most.” Fuentes avows belief in many other things, too: in at least a modicum of essential goodness in Homo sapiens; in Shakespeare and Faulkner; in love that, because mature and real and all-embracing, also contains some element of evil; in the “warm breasts of the girls in Boulder, Colorado”; in the possibility of his fellow Mexicans one day casting aside the “legend of the defeated” and taking their rightful place in the world (after all, Mexico is five times the size of France); in friendship, although all friendships are doomed to end one day; and in sundry odd other matters. Anyone who has kept up with Fuentes’s work over the last five decades will find some expected notes: a love verging on worship of other writers, most memorably expressed in passages on encountering Thomas Mann in Zurich; a conviction that reason will one day point the way toward our getting out of the various messes that we get ourselves into. But there are surprises here, too, and even a few puzzles: a head-scratching moment when Fuentes recalls holding an infant daughter, another where he propagates a novel view of one particularly well-known figure in history (“Jesus does not resurrect the dead. He revives the living. Jesus is the copy editor of human life”). All these opinions, centripetal and centrifugal, are developed to greater or lesser degrees: sometimes Fuentes turns in whole essays, crisply written and self-contained, in defense of one thesis or another; at other times he offers up crystalline apothegms surrounded by not much of anything in particular.
Either way, This I Believe is full of pleasures. Whatever their setting, the most memorable of these pieces ably show why Fuentes has been so well regarded all these years.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6246-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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