Invaluable not only for aficionados of contemporary Latin writing but also for scholars tracking film’s impact on serious...
An affectionately explicit biography of genre-bending Argentinean novelist Puig (1932–90), written by a translator and friend.
Levine (Spanish and Portuguese/Univ. of California) begins by reconstructing the small-town Argentinean world whose stifling boredom drove Puig’s mother Malé almost nightly to the movies with her precocious son. Romances and musicals provided the effeminate Puig with a dreamy exile from the machismo and homophobia that surrounded him on all sides in the outside world. His distaste for life in Péronist Argentina was reflected in his rocky rejection of his father Baldo. Levine’s candid use of Puig’s alternately discreet and graphic letters and conversation helps to describe the process by which Puig first became conscious of his homosexuality and eventually concluded that it was an unalterable part of himself. Handsome, volatile, and penny-pinching, Puig maintained a strict discipline in regard to his writing, which he practiced every day whether he was at home or on one of his increasingly frequent journeys abroad (usually in the company of his beloved mother). Levine demonstrates how such works as Puig’s autobiographical Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971) and his prison-cell melodrama Kiss of the Spider Woman (1979) recycle “the debris of mass culture”—newspaper soap serials, detective stories, B-movie plots, etc. In Puig’s world, characters never integrate emotion and sex into sustained adult relationships—much in the same way that Puig, fearful of aging without “a husband” despite international homage, never quite grappled with his own uneasy truths before his early (and somewhat suspicious) death from complications that arose after gallbladder surgery. Levine (The Subversive Scribe, 1991), who collaborated with Puig on English versions of his novels, canvassed film archives, interviewed surviving friends, and combed through Puig’s abundant unpublished writings to construct a somewhat disheveled life-story befitting Puig’s motley existence.
Invaluable not only for aficionados of contemporary Latin writing but also for scholars tracking film’s impact on serious revisionary literature. (b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-28190-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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