Octogenarian memoirist and novelist von Rezzori (Oedipus at Stalingrad, 1994, etc.) reflects with wit and bitter irony on the physical and literary terrain of his journey through the 20th century. Born in the Bukovina (formerly part of Austria-Hungary) in 1914, von Rezzori has for the past 80-plus years lived in and spoken the languages of Austria, Romania, Germany, and Italy, where he currently resides. Although this memoir is spurred by a recent hospitalization and by the author's return to post-communist Romania and Germany, it is foremost a work of literary imagination, as the title aptly reflects. Like Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights, which forms the memoir's narrative framework, von Rezzori delights in the act of telling and captivates his audience. Damning the world's ``riffraffization,'' especially the hegemony of the mass media, von Rezzori draws a self-portrait of a man adrift in his own ``unreal'' times: ``A nineteenth-century man of letters on the threshold of the twenty-first.'' A brief visit with his wife to an Indian ashram provides one of many occasions for mirthful reflections on power and religion in the 20th century. Closer to home, the self-confessed curmudgeon (``My own babble bores me to tears'') treats his readers to hilarious and accurate insights, such as this comment on Cologne's Carnival: ``There I observed how hard Germans have to work to organize a bit of whimsical chaos for their own enjoyment.'' His Romania is ``a surrealist country.'' A theme woven through the narrative is von Rezzori's admiration for the late writer Bruce Chatwin, whose work he sets up as a standard he never quite attained himself, although Goethe, Musil, Nabokov, Hofmannsthal, and others, who bob in and out of his reflections, he refers to as ``colleagues.'' This cosmopolite makes no concessions to cultural illiteracy: He presupposed a reader as steeped as he is in the high culture of Central Europe. No riffraff allowed.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-22295-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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