A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my life," remarks Nabokov in an almost mock-Hegelian passage near the end of a rippling, vivid, ironically elegiac memoir, ranging "geographically from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire ...covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time." The original work was published in 1951, and the current edition is a revised or "revisited" one, including both new or revamped material, as well as some deletions. There is, for instance, no longer the eye-winking attribution of two lesser-known Nabokov novels to "Sirin," an emigre figure who is, of course, Nabokov himself, and who is still modestly dubbed the best of the young Russian "writers in exile." The reminiscences unwind in an engagingly random manner, held together by the author's fantastically assured and flexible tone, his exquisite sense of detail and prankish art, his blithely idiosyncratic opinions; the Russian Revolution is dismissed as "that trite deus ex machina." The lustrous family portraits are fondly drawn: Mother, Father, Uncle Ruka—cultured, liberal aristocrats, brave and eccentric, in the splendid setting of country estates, politics, sports, and literature. There are adolescent awakenings and European spas, a dreamy first love, a humorous and touching tribute to "Mademoiselle," Nabokov's favorite governess; then flight from the Bolsheviks, schooling at Cambridge, breadwinning in Paris and Berlin. A minor classic, one of the richest works of a master stylist.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1951
ISBN: 0375405534
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1966
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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