De Montalembert deftly shows how his other senses came to the fore after he lost his sight, but his spiritual awakening...
An impressionistic memoir by an artist whose lack of sight hasn’t diminished his lust for life.
In 1978, painter and filmmaker de Montalembert was attacked in his Manhattan home by a pair of burglars, one of whom threw paint thinner in his eyes and blinded him permanently. He recalled the assault and his recovery in Eclipse (1985), which became a bestseller in his native France. Invisible tells much the same story, but this slim book is styled more like a prose poem than a formal autobiography. Brief chapters alternate between the present and past tense, capturing both the author’s feelings of loss and fear in the days after the attack as well as his growing confidence in the years that followed. A lifelong world traveler, he slowly learned not just to navigate New York City streets but to catch planes to Indonesia, Greenland, India and other far-flung places, where he sought and occasionally found spiritual peace. De Montalembert is more hard-headed and down-to-earth than such earnest seeking might suggest. He bluntly states that “loss of sight is a mechanical accident, not a state of grace or an event fraught with spiritual consequences,” and he displays admirable candor and biting wit in discussing his clumsy first efforts to get around as a blind man, not to mention the romances that helped him during his recovery. However, specific events on his journey, including a trip to a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas, cry out for a fuller treatment, and the closing chapters drift into airy platitudes about the pleasures of art and the need to resist self-pity. The book is not a feel-good story, but that doesn’t stop the author from lapsing into clichés about hope and the future.
De Montalembert deftly shows how his other senses came to the fore after he lost his sight, but his spiritual awakening feels unconvincing.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9366-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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