A complex portrait of the nature and power of narrative.
An author and illustrator meditates on the need to remember the past in order to understand the present.
As a 10-year-old growing up on the banks of the Seine in the 1960s, Pajak “dreamt of a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea.” But, as he puts it, “my book died every day.” Years later, he found his theme: “The evocation of erased History and of the war of time,” by which he means “the war waged by a present stripped of its past, crumbled into an improbable future, be it radiant or disenchanted.” Most pages display Pajak’s black-and-white drawings followed by short paragraphs. The author writes of the many artists and writers who grappled with the 20th century’s most significant questions, most notably the fascism and anti-Semitism embodied not only in figures like Hitler and Mussolini, but also in a pair of Pajak’s boarding school classmates, one of whom performed the Nazi salute when teachers left the room and “was always fulminating against the Jews.” Among the figures Pajak cites are Samuel Beckett, artist Bram van Velde, and Walter Benjamin, especially Benjamin’s time in Spain before the Spanish Civil War and his belief that “the supposed universality of History lacked the mute voice of the oppressed.” If some drawing-prose combinations are too on-the-nose—a picture of a fort as the author notes that Benjamin likened Andre Gidé’s thoughts to a fort—others offer witty contrasts, as when he pairs childhood memories of the smell of his grandmother’s flat with a drawing of himself smoking as a young boy. Some of the combinations are chilling: A drawing of an emaciated man in a concentration camp appears on the same page on which Pajak cites Benjamin’s awareness of the rise of anti-Semitism among French intellectuals.
A complex portrait of the nature and power of narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-286-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
