A potent narrative that builds from matter-of-fact observation through horrific experience toward a metaphysical acceptance...
Subtle meditation and devastating detail combine in this journalistic memoir of refugee landings on the Italian island of Lampedusa.
A prizewinning playwright in his native Italy, Enia (On Earth as It Is in Heaven, 2014, etc.) relies on the skills he sharpened as a journalist to recount the often deadly plight of exiles traveling over treacherous waters from Africa to Europe. Yet those depths also provide a backdrop for more intimate accounts—of a close friend who succumbed to cancer and an uncle who is suffering the same. In the aftermath of a particularly calamitous shipwreck—only 155 survivors landed on Lampedusa of the more than 500 who had begun the voyage—one rescuer observed, “It’s normal, isn’t it? You see someone in the water, you lean over from the deck of the boat and you do your best to grab him. Anyone who sees a person drowning does whatever he can to rescue him. It’s not like we’re heroes, after all.” Such instinctive decency triumphs over polarized politics or fear of the “other”—a fear that can go both ways, as many of the African refugees have apparently never seen white skin before. The author’s companion witness on the island is his father, a retired physician–turned-photographer who is both loving and reticent. The two communicate through the words the son writes, the images the father captures, and the silences that are pregnant with meaning between the two. “In doing portraits of faces, my father could sense the disintegration of life,” writes Enia, continuing, “it was my father’s way of trying to start a dialogue with God Himself, a dialogue that contained both an effort to understand and a conscious abandonment of self to the mystery of existence.” Like the sea itself, that mystery is fathoms deep, encapsulated in a multilayered narrative that attempts to come to terms with the universality of mortality.
A potent narrative that builds from matter-of-fact observation through horrific experience toward a metaphysical acceptance that is something like a state of grace.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-908-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
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