As fragile and as haunting as memory itself.
A spare, trembling and troubling memoir of loss from recently widowed novelist and social commentator Roiphe (An Imperfect Lens, 2006, etc.).
Flirting with (but never seriously courting) cliché, the author offers as a principal metaphor the phases of the moon, but readers must resist the urge to roll their eyes at this all-too-familiar friend and instead marvel at the intricate tale she crafts. Its structure is so fine as to be all but invisible, and each word seems like the individual beat of a human heart. Using the present—that most gossamer of tenses—throughout, she tells a series of stories about herself and her deceased husband, identified only as H. Eventually, we learn a number of things about him: He read and reread the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope; he loved Mozart and the Dutch masters. He touched his wife often, always used his key at the front door. We learn, too, about her family: her first marriage, her daughters, an estrangement from a nephew that death and time are healing. Nearing 70, the author wonders if she needs another man in her life. She tries online-dating services and relates meetings with men whose failures to be her lost husband she describes most affectingly. One persistent e-mail correspondent continually sends her pages of right-wing paranoia, yet she remains attracted to him for a long time—longer, she knows, than sense should have allowed. She recalls old friendships, examines closely the dying of the light, decides to catalog the imperfections of her husband but can criticize only his erratic driving and, worst of all, his dying. She gives away his clothes but can’t decide what to do with his neckties. Her occasional flashbacks to the emergency room and the funeral are bright bursts of painful light.
As fragile and as haunting as memory itself.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-125462-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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