In sharing the experience of solitude and reflection, Sjöberg invites readers to see through his eyes, in language that is...
A literary memoir by the Swedish author, a man who lives on an island and collects flies, reflecting on the significance of his obsession.
Both an entomologist and a literary critic, Sjöberg blurs the border between these two vocations while exploring plenty of other territory as well. “Here and there, my story is about something else,” he admits. “Exactly what, I don’t know.” Readers will share his uncertainty, as he proceeds like one of his beloved hoverflies, flitting from his experiences on an island east of Stockholm to his meditations on time, concentration, and the language of geography to his literary appreciations of D.H. Lawrence, Milan Kundera, and Bruce Chatwin to his investigations into the life of an obscure naturalist–turned–art collector. The author recognizes that devoting his life to flies might not have the romantic resonance with readers that butterflies would, but he finds himself within a realm where “everything flies, absolutely everything,” a world that can be read as “a thousand commentaries. An entire apparatus of footnotes.” Most of the book takes place within the mind of the author—the connections he makes and the implications he finds—though sometimes he ventures out to provide naturalistic detail of his life on the island or historical inquiry into the lives of entomologists with whom he seems to be having more of a conversation than with any of his living contemporaries. In a rare encounter with another human, who asks what he is doing and why, he reflects, “It is at such moments that the entomologist becomes a story-teller. He is prepared to do almost anything to get someone to listen and perhaps understand. He is prepared to use any ruse or artifice to avoid being the only one who sees.”
In sharing the experience of solitude and reflection, Sjöberg invites readers to see through his eyes, in language that is often poetic, sometimes inscrutable.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87015-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
