A well-researched account of a literary dust-up marred by superficial writing.
A former Moscow correspondent chronicles one of the most famous literary spats of the 20th century.
In 1939, the composer Nicolas Nabokov rented a house on Cape Cod across the street from Edmund Wilson, the Russophile editor of the New Republic, and asked for a favor: could he help his cousin, Vladimir, recently arrived from St. Petersburg, secure some reviewing gigs? Wilson obliged. He and Vladimir became friends, even though Wilson failed to convince the younger man—whom Boston Globe columnist Beam (American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church, 2014, etc.) calls “the twentieth century’s Trickster King”—to abandon his love of puns and anagrams. After two decades of friendship, however, Wilson wrote a “generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job” about Nabokov’s massive four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Years of public bickering followed. Beam does an excellent job of depicting the growing strain between the two men, brought on in part by the huge success of Lolita compared to Wilson’s own attempt at a salacious novel, Memoirs of Hecate County. The pages devoted to the back and forth among Nabokov, Wilson, and other luminaries who weighed in on the Onegin contretemps are great fun. But the flippant tone of Beam’s writing—note the book’s subtitle—may rankle some readers. Nabokov was “a quick-on-the-uptake student at the Edmund Wilson Academy of Not Taking Sh*t from Publishers.” Spendthrift Wilson and money “were never destined to share a taxicab.” Nabokov fans are “deep-dish Nabokovians.” When Wilson argued about Russian prosody, he “revisited Gerundistan.” After he quotes Nabokov’s dismissal of lesser Onegin translations, Beam reprimands him with, “But really, Vladimir.” Prose that calls attention to itself didn’t always serve Nabokov well, and it doesn’t work here, either.
A well-researched account of a literary dust-up marred by superficial writing.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87022-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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