Readers get only a vague sense of what these things we don’t want to know might be in a book that seems like a catharsis for...
A slim, elliptical memoir from novelist, poet and playwright Levy.
Only in the most expansive terms can this be considered a book “on writing,” as it is subtitled, though it could be considered a portrait of the writer as a young girl. Most of it at least, for the framing is plainly the author’s adulthood, before the publication of her well-received novel Swimming Home (2011). It begins: “That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations.” Levy provides no context for her existential crisis, but she recounts her geographical cure to Majorca, where she shared a restaurant table with a Chinese man, who asked her where she was born. She writes, “I’m not sure I went on to say everything you’re going to read now.” Levy was born in apartheid South Africa, living in Johannesburg, when her father was imprisoned for being a member of the African National Congress. The author then lived with her godmother, where she didn’t quite fit with the family and, perhaps symbolically, freed a bird from its cage (as she’d desired to do for her caged father). Eventually, her father was freed, and the family exiled itself to England, where Levy wondered, “How was I ever going to escape from living in exile? I wanted to be in exile from exile.” Her full-circle return to the Majorca of the book’s beginning brings a perspective informed by politics, feminism, and the challenge and redemption of writing: “What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?”
Readers get only a vague sense of what these things we don’t want to know might be in a book that seems like a catharsis for the writer but might prove enigmatic for most readers.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-565-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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