Barnes’ reticence is as eloquent as it is soul-shuddering.
A book about the death of a spouse that is unlike any other—book or spouse—and thus illuminates the singularity as well as the commonality of grieving.
Having provocatively addressed the matter of mortality (Nothing To Be Frightened Of, 2008), the award-winning British novelist brings a different perspective to the death of his wife. There is actually little about his long marriage to literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who was successful, respected and private. “Grief, like death, is banal and unique,” he writes, with the sort of matter-of-fact precision that gives this book its power. In the two early sections, on ballooning, photography and love, Barnes employs an almost mannered, incantatory tone that seems more like a repression of emotion than an expression of it, making readers wonder how these meditations on perspective might ultimately cohere. “You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not,” he writes about a doomed love affair between a famous actress and balloon adventurer. “They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves.” Just as it took five years for Barnes to address his wife’s death in print, it takes two sections of establishing tone and perspective before he writes of his mourning directly, though of course, he has been writing about it from the start of the book. “I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely,” he writes. Ultimately, he finds some resonance in opera, which had never interested him before, as he discovers that “song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word—both higher and deeper.” The perspectives of height and depth tie the first two sections to the third, where love and death can’t ever be resolved but rather, somehow survived.
Barnes’ reticence is as eloquent as it is soul-shuddering.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35077-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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