The Russian Nobel laureate speaks his mind on poetry, other poets, and his life in conversations with another intellectual Russian ÇmigrÇ. In his preface, Volkov (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, 1995, etc.) suggests that his reader regard these conversations with Brodsky ``as a guide, a kind of Baedeker, to the breathtaking, often beautiful, and at times forbidding territory of Brodsky's life and art.'' It is a bad start. This kind of blurb-speak immediately sets the teeth on edge, and the pages that follow do not bear out Volkov's exaggerated claim. Little bears directly on Brodsky's art. But we do hear Brodsky talking about his life (arrest, trial) under the Soviet regime and then his life in exile in the US. And he talks a good deal about the art of other writers, in particular Marina Tsvetaeva (his favorite candidate for great poet of the century), Anna Akhmatova (``she set our souls in motion''), W.H. Auden (an aphoristic thinker), and Robert Frost (the great poet of horror). As we might expect, Brodsky has various interesting things to say about poets and poetry. Unfortunately, Volkov's freewheeling conversations do not probe deeply. Volkov, as rough-and-ready a talker as the great poet, encourages him to roam extravagantly in his literary chitchat, which means that he fails in his task as an interviewer. He doesn't always press the poet into greater precision and fuller depth. Still, you cannot go terribly wrong with Brodsky as your partner in conversation. There is much of interest here. Though this is not so lean and pithy as the general reader may wish, students of poetry will find Volkov's book suggestive. And as for the autobiographical material it makes available, Brodsky offers a caveat: ``There is nothing duller than to look at an artist's work as the result of his life.'' (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83572-X
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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