A deep-sounding recovery project of memories new and old, fired by years of reflection.
A sometimes sad but seductive collage of memories of two months spent with a Japanese woman and an Inuit elder in Canada’s far north.
In the late summer of 1977, Norman (The Bird Artist, 1994, etc.), who had not then stepped into his novelist’s shoes, went to a town on Hudson Bay in the employ of an American museum to transcribe and translate narratives of the Noah stories. By coincidence, Helen Tanizaki was also there, working on the same stories with the same elder, Mark Nuqac. Tanizaki and Norman were two sides of a coin. She was a sensitive, accomplished ethnographer and translator: introspective, ardent, lucid. He was a befuddled neophyte: agitated, anxious, without poise. Their friendship emerged as they worked to capture and clarify the Noah stories, which were radically different as perceived from the Inuit point of view, on the one hand, and from Norman’s point of view, on the other. Less confusingly, these were stories about the precariousness of life, which reverberated long and hard with the fact that Tanizaki was dying of stomach cancer, and about a stranger in a strange land, which fitted Norman to a T. Now blessed with great poise, Norman twines 11 Noah stories with the landscape of melancholy: his ineptitude, the unforgiving Arctic, the “black butterflies” of Tanizaki’s doom. Though Norman is careful not to get sentimental, something Tanizaki would not have appreciated, readers will find it hard not to fall, as he did, for her talent, her epigrammatic opinions, the freshness of her prayers (“I would like to see / a red phalarope / (please)”) and the elegance of her restraint. Norman may have been in over his head, but he kept his eyes and curiosity open; he engaged, and Tanizaki likely appreciated that very much.
A deep-sounding recovery project of memories new and old, fired by years of reflection.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-86547-680-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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