But Fowles is preeminently, of course, one of the most accomplished English novelists of the last half-century, and this...
The master British novelist records, in shapely prose, the struggles involved in attaining his craft, as well as the usual coming-of-age worries.
Fowles (Wormholes, 1998, etc.), the author of such lapidary novels as Daniel Martin and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, seems never to have considered an ordinary life, whatever that might be. “I cannot imagine working in a routine post,” he wrote in his mid-20s. As a young man living in the rural West Country during WWII, he learned poaching from a well-intended Home Guard commander; still earlier, he had the mouth of the Thames for his playground, which brought him the knowledge and, in a sense, the outlook of a Victorian naturalist. Torn between science and literature, Fowles quite sensibly chose to do a French degree at “Oxford the imperturbable,” though he decided while in the “silly little city” of Poitiers that he didn’t really want to go to lectures, really didn’t want to read the required texts; he really wanted to write himself: “I have the blend—the sensual flesh and the oversensitive mind,” he confided in his journal. “Some artistic good is bound to come of it.” Steeped in Kafka and Camus, Fowles wandered around Europe while collecting material and aperçus for The Magus, which took him nearly 13 years to finish. While teaching at private schools and colleges, Fowles records, he read nearly everything and let no detail go unnoticed, as when he ponders the startling people he would meet in the Greek backcountry: “A Persian-German has psychological (and ornithological) possibilities; will repay watching.” He also collected just about everything it was possible to collect, which he dismissed by observing that as long as it didn’t become obsessive or ruinous, anything was permitted. Small wonder that Fowles later characterized himself as being made up of various selves, one a poet, one a traveler, one a naturalist, one a movie buff, etc.
But Fowles is preeminently, of course, one of the most accomplished English novelists of the last half-century, and this glimpse into his education and work is a pleasure.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4431-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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 2025 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.
