Deeply thoughtful essays on literature’s gifts and consolations.
The New Yorker critic celebrates the richness of literature in his own life.
At once touching, elegant, and wise, the essays collected in this slim volume were originally delivered as lectures, the first three at Brandeis University and the fourth at the British Museum. Wood (Literary Criticism/Harvard Univ.; The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays, 2012, etc.) admires criticism that is “not especially analytical” but rather “a kind of passionate redescription.” His own reflections on a wide range of writers—including Woolf, Chekhov, Teju Cole, Henry Green, and Aleksandar Hemon—are infused with the passion of a voracious, highly discerning reader. Since childhood, he writes, books have “irradiated” his mind “by the energy of their compressed contents.” Growing up in the northern English town of Durham in a family of “engaged Christians,” Wood found in literature answers to the philosophical question “why?” that were not simply theological. When he was 15, he discovered Martin Seymour-Smith’s Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction. He was enthralled by the book’s gazetteer of writers and by the author’s terse evaluations of a novel’s greatness. Seymour-Smith was a literary “Siskel and Ebert.” For Wood, “great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphors and imagery.” Metaphors generate a “form of identification” that creates a reader’s empathy for fictional characters. Great writers, Wood adds, “rescue the life of things” from annihilation caused by fading memories and inattention. In “Secular Homelessness,” Wood considers the “strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over everything” that he feels in America, where he has lived for the past 18 years. He offers the word “homelooseness” as more accurate than homelessness or exile to describe that sense: a feeling that “the ties that bind one to Home have been loosened.”
Deeply thoughtful essays on literature’s gifts and consolations.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61168-742-2
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Brandeis Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
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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