A unique and wonderfully entertaining collection of reflections and fictions. Now in his 70s, Herling is known for stories published under the title The Island (1967) and for a much-acclaimed memoir of his two years in a Soviet labor camp, A World Apart (1986). The Polish writer, who lives in Naples, has been publishing brief pieces, elegant journal entries, in the Polish exile periodical Kultura for two and a half decades. The publication in English of this excellent selection of them is cause for celebration. Herling is a virtuoso of his chosen genre. His little pieces—most are only a page or two—are rich in a rare sort of intelligence that is specifically literary in two ways. First, his imagination is steeped in the European and American literary tradition. For Herling the bond between art and life is strong. His is a way of knowing the world that enables him, for example, to see how Joseph Conrad's fiction can be brought to bear—subtly, compellingly, effortlessly—on the problem of Italian terrorism in the 1970s. Second, thanks to Strom's fine translation, Herling's gift for prose comes through as forthright and unpretentious yet also elegant. Style and insight fuse seamlessly in these bright, hard gemstones, and in some sense style even becomes insight. His language reveals the hidden depths in otherwise ordinary experience. His topics range widely from literature and art to politics, history, and religion. What finally binds this disparate collection into a whole, though, is the uniformly intense quality of attention that he devotes to each of his subjects. A literary performance of the highest order by a writer too little known in this country.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-85482-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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