Can it be that this the most beautifully written, the most perfectly proportioned of anything Sartre has done will turn out to be his most beloved, or at any rate, most popular work? The phenomenal French sales suggest just that. If so, how ironic! Sartre's reputation was built to a large degree on an iconoclastic opposition to his country's aesthetic tradition, on a campaign for literature in the thick of things. To be sure, an existential choice is presented, surprisingly paralleling that of Saint Genet and even the Baudelaire study, but unlike them the temper or tone is no longer engaged. Rather it's a blend of philosophical romanticism (echoes of Rimbaud's Les Poetes de sept ans) and of classical craftsmanship like Montaigne. The work- superficially a childhood remembrance ending in Sartre's eleventh year when his mother remarries- moves on many levels: as a purging of the past (he grew up a "nobody's son," an "object" without a father in a bourgeois never-never land); as a salvation hunt (he discovers the family library, a temple where words become substitutions for the sacramental, a "project" to replace his worn-out Christianity); lastly, and perhaps most importantly, as a fiction consciously imposed over fact (he recreates himself: a little ugly darling in a "movie," a hero accepting his "bastardy," his role to outwit circumstance). Thus both self-indictment and self-transcendence, the very apotheosis of a writer spitting in the face of "fate" or of its illusions. What a severe and subtle work, what self-exposure! And yet... isn't there a certain theatricality here, a superbly analytical temperament, not a cry, not a real confrontation? That a master wrote Les Mots is unquestionable, that he wrote from the heart is not.
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1964
ISBN: 0394747097
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1964
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
SEEN & HEARD
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