Largely small talk in a small book produces lighter reading than intended.
A Parisian city mouse listens to a garrulous country mouth and transcribes the philosophy he hears.
Cueco is a writer and an artist (take his word for the art; his book is presented sans illustrations). He has a place somewhere in the countryside where the garden is lovingly tended by a wise retired railwayman, seemingly of a certain age. The writer acts as knowing and sensitive interlocutor. His text is a record of the gardener’s yeomanly profundities—all founded on the most quotidian stuff. There are reports of the man’s journey to the rainy seaside and of his bad teeth, of beautiful courgettes, pesky moles and manure. He finds beauty in a cabbage.The gardener—one Frenchman who will not drink wine—subsists, it appears, largely on kippers and soup. For comic effect, on a visit to Paris he brings an anvil. (It’s to sharpen a scythe, he says, to further comic effect). His advice: Always carry a piece of string in your pocket. And a knife. On travel: The Algerian desert is “nothing but sand.” A bit of folk wisdom: “With a hat, you’ve got shade wherever you are.” Theology: “He was a good bloke, that Jesus.” Getting bored yet? There’s more palaver about gravel, a new red scooter and whether socks are comfortable inside the old man’s muddy wellies. (The book, translated from the French, contains British-isms like “buggers,” “gobsmacking,” “knackers.”) The lackadaisical tone is eventually offset a bit with reports of illnesses, a trip to spruce up some gravesites and getting up close and personal with soil. Note, students, there’s some foreshadowing going on. The book finally achieves an elegiac mode to conclude its transcript of banalities that reach for depth without much success.
Largely small talk in a small book produces lighter reading than intended.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-86207-840-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Granta UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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