A fresh and color-drenched memoir by an artist unafraid to offend.
Vivid portraits, affectionate but unsparing, of people encountered by Nobel laureate Canetti (Notes from Hampstead, 1998, etc.) while living in England.
Canetti (1905–94) was very social, and he encountered a good swathe of personalities from the moment he arrived in England in 1939. He found warmth, sensitivity and integrity in the ordinary folks who swept streets and rented rooms. He was less taken with the artists, intellectuals, politicians and aristocrats who constituted the bulk of his acquaintance (and a cross-section of England’s hierarchy). T.S. Eliot represented for Canetti all that was thin-lipped, cold-hearted and prematurely old in British life. Of Eliot’s fame, he writes, “Is it possible ever to repent sufficiently of that?” He was just as judgmental about Iris Murdoch, though she had been his occasional lover: “Iris is what I would call an ‘illegitimate’ writer. She never suffered from having to write.” Recounting his associations with a panorama of English characters, Canetti is by turns a memoirist, satirist and anthropologist. The volcanic emotions expressed here are perhaps best understood as his response to the chilliness of British manners. He hated the polite, implacably hierarchal laws of English society, a stance that allowed him to admire Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s passion while stating that “I don’t know that I have ever encountered anyone quite so antithetical to everything I stand for.” He found more common ground with thoughtful eccentrics like the inventor Geoffrey Pyke and the Orientalist Arthur Waley. Before leaving for Zurich in 1984, Canetti got off a final salvo, this one at Margaret Thatcher’s government: “the claque of the apostles of selfishness.”
A fresh and color-drenched memoir by an artist unafraid to offend.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-8112-1636-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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