Veteran novelist Burgess is also a composer—he includes a surprisingly long list of music-works here—and these are "highly personal meditations" on music and literature, their contrasts and intersections. First comes a brief musical autobiography: a music-hall-singer mother whom Burgess never knew (she died when he was less than two), Manchester childhood, with hapless violin lessons followed by the real discovery of music at age twelve (hearing L'Après-midi d'un Faune on the radio); Burgess' determination to be a composer, pop-music as an Army-bandleader, his first symphony ("My orchestration was Elgarian with Holstian condiments"). Then, after a brief, not-very-illuminating consideration of words vs. notes, their impact in time and space, Burgess half-wryly details the 1974 writing of his third symphony, movement by movement, almost bar by bar: "That descent in tritonal fourths is, I foresee, in danger of being employed as a mannerism." Next: some very conventional, if ultimately overstated, musings on "meaning" in music since Bach. ("Music might have pretended, with Berlioz and Strauss, to absorb literature, but in fact it had turned itself into an adjunct to literature—critical, illustrative. Mozart was the last of the great composers.") Equally unsurprising are Burgess' close-up analyses of the musicality in Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm ("turning the poetic foot into a musical measure"), or in Joyce's prose. And finally, after an intriguing but undeveloped discussion of song lyrics, there are explications of the ostensibly music-like structures of two Burgess novels: the poorly-received MF (1971), whose "story discloses all the elements of a closed structure, like a piece of music"; and Napoleon Symphony, with its structure derived from Beethoven's "Eroica." ("Can music teach anything to the novelist? Yes: the importance of structure.") In sum, then: an uneven potpourri, from the broadly appealing opening memoir to chapters for musicological/literary specialists only—with Burgess alternately charming, blathery, shrewd, obscure. . . and self-indulgent.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1983
ISBN: 155783489X
Page Count: 196
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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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