A winningly interior journey into the most interior of seasons.
The Norwegian author continues his series of seasonal meditations with some appropriately austere thoughts on nature and life in a cold climate.
This is the second book in a planned quartet that Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book Five, 2016, etc.) conceived as a kind of welcoming present for his newborn daughter, collecting brief musings on a variety of quotidian subjects, written as if one were seeing the world anew. Its predecessor, Autumn (2017), balanced riffs on philosophical themes (forgiveness, illness) with more overtly offbeat takes on everyday stuff (tin cans, vomit). Here, the author sticks to more elemental matters, drawing heavily on nature and Scandinavian folklore, while also writing more personally about friends and the messiness of family life. (One piece is literally titled “Mess.”) Pipes evoke “a vast physical network which lies coiled, serpent-like around the globe”; stuffed animals externalize what children’s “souls look like, small, soft, good, and faithful”; a train is “an embodiment of longing”; sugar is a “cheap and simple pleasure” undermined by good-health hard-liners. Where the prevailing mood in Knausgaard’s My Struggle novels is anxiety, these seasonal books are propelled by his sense of wonder. Whether he’s contemplating a deer struck by a car on the highway or a beloved pair of “old, tattered, almost Chaplin-esque boots,” the author casts the world in a holy glow of surprise and compassion, whether it involves science or myth. The fact that he follows a piece on atoms with one on the prankster god Loki seems no accident. Trying to see the world anew, though, also means seeing the world weirdly at times, and he delivers peculiar takes on Q-tips and half-seriously proposes “sex stations along major roads” to satisfy carnal cravings. Such moments, however, read more like fresh perspectives than hollow provocations.
A winningly interior journey into the most interior of seasons.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56333-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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