Many of the mysteries of the literary world remain mysteries to the author, but she provides good company as she explores...
A sharply observed coming-of-age memoir about an aspiring writer’s entry-level job at a fading literary agency.
Though Rakoff earned acclaim for her debut novel (A Fortunate Age, 2009), her memoir is more engaging, particularly for its mastery of tone. The author establishes herself as something of an innocent, a master’s grad who wanted to write poetry but required a job to tide her over. She found one at an unnamed literary agency that continued to operate with typewriters and fax machines and where her boss’s main responsibility was the nonbusiness of J.D. Salinger. It would be easy for a satiric hipster to have satirical fun with the material—particularly with the onslaught of letters from generations of Salinger fans who actually expected (or even demanded) a response—but Rakoff isn’t that sort of author. She reserves just the slightest bit of judgmental irony for herself and for her boyfriend, a socialist, boxer and aspiring novelist. Her family recognized that she was a glorified secretary at a menial job that would bring her no closer to fulfilling her literary ambitions and didn’t provide her with sufficient salary to pay her bills. Against her boss's admonitions, she developed something of a telephone relationship with Salinger (whom she’d never read before taking the job), finding him “never anything but kind and patient. More so than plenty of people who called the Agency. More so than plenty of his fans.” Eventually, Rakoff fell in love with his books, established correspondence with some who wrote him (and learned why a form letter was previously the standard response), assumed more responsibility as a manuscript reader and something of an agent herself, and left the agency as a published poet.
Many of the mysteries of the literary world remain mysteries to the author, but she provides good company as she explores them.Pub Date: June 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-95800-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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