Enlightening walks through cities, cultural history, and a writer’s heart and soul.
An American freelance essayist and translator living in Paris debuts with an appealing blend of memoir, scholarship, and cultural criticism.
White Review contributing editor Elkin presents a feminine alteration of the French word flâneur (“one who wanders aimlessly”) and uses both her own experiences and those of some noted writers and other artists to illustrate her principal thesis: that women have long needed to be as free to roam about, geographically and artistically, as men have been. “The portraits I paint here attest that the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur,” writes the author, “but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own….She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Elkin’s own story runs through the text like a luminous thread. She tells us the woman-in-the-street stories of Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Sophie Calle, Agnès Varda, and Martha Gellhorn, but all sorts of other cultural figures appear, including Barthes, Rilke, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Derrida, Dickens, and numerous others. Elkin is frank about her own life, discussing a long, failed relationship—following him, she moved to Tokyo, where her initial unhappiness in the city transformed to deep affection—her ambivalence about leaving one city she loved, New York, which is near family and friends, for another she came to love even more: Paris. (She has become a French citizen.) Elkin also lived for a time in London and Venice, but though she loved both places, it is Paris now owning her heart. The pattern of her principal chapters is fairly steady: her own story mixed with sometimes overly detailed accounts of a notable woman associated with the city. These minibiographies and exegeses of the artists’ work are occasionally heavier than casual readers may be willing to bear, but for the patient, there are the bright rewards of insight and new information.
Enlightening walks through cities, cultural history, and a writer’s heart and soul.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-15604-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
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