A nonfictional footnote to a brilliant career in fiction.
A slim, elliptical, often poetic memoir by the late Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The opening pages of this posthumously published memoir of early childhood by Saramago (The Elephant’s Journey, 2010, etc.) are so rapturously enthralling that they set a standard the rest of the narrative—mainly a series of anecdotes, seemingly random and arbitrary—cannot fully sustain. “Only I knew, without knowing I did, that on the illegible pages of destiny and in the blind meanderings of chance it had been written that I would one day return to Azinhaga to finish being born,” he writes of his birth in a peasant village before he moved with his family to Lisbon before his second birthday—after that he spent time alternating between the two (the writing here mainly and more lovingly portrays the country than the city). Though an early and avid reader with an eye for significant detail, his “silent, secret, solitary self” as a boy gave little hint of the literary master he would become. His mother remained illiterate throughout his life, as were the maternal grandparents to whom he so often returned. Without apparent thematic focus—other than the vagaries of memory and perhaps the ambiguities of boyhood innocence—the memoir hopscotches chronologically through his experiences with dogs, horses and crops; his schooling; his initiation into sexual arousal; and his family. He reveals that he’d initially attempted a volume with the more ambitious title, The Book of Temptations, before realizing that his reminiscences were more modest, “the small memories of when I was small.”
A nonfictional footnote to a brilliant career in fiction.Pub Date: May 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-15-101508-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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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