A short but entertaining, thoroughly engaging study on the agony of filial influence.
Irish literary geniuses and their fathers: three compelling portraits that measure just how far the apple falls from the tree.
Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce weren’t just three of the greatest writers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. As Irish-born novelist and critic Tóibín (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; House of Names, 2017, etc.) demonstrates, they also suffered serious daddy issues. If Wilde had exalted notions of his own class and intellect, consider that his father, William, was a man of extraordinary accomplishments: doctor, voluminous writer on travel, medicine, and folklore, archaeologist, and statistician. He was also knighted by the queen and lived as he wished. Neither he nor Oscar’s mother, Jane, followed the rules. If Oscar shared their “sense of nobility and their feeling that they could do whatever they wanted,” it didn’t always work out as well for him. William suffered a bruising moral scandal but basically emerged unscathed; his son, decades later, wouldn’t fare so well. Yeats’ father, John, was a painter who couldn’t finish a painting, even the self-portrait that consumed his final years. Sons William and Jack took the negative example to heart, taking pride “in finishing almost everything they started.” Joyce paid homage to John Stanislaus Joyce in the very last line of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.” The older man was perpetually drunk, broke, and abusive; his son deserted him in life and redeemed him in art. “He allows him,” Tóibín writes, “to be the man he is with his friends rather than with his family.” Joyce said of Ulysses, “the humour of [it] is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image.”
A short but entertaining, thoroughly engaging study on the agony of filial influence.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8517-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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