A thought-provoking memoir about the significance of literature in life.
A distinguished fiction writer traces the relationship between significant periods in her life and the novels she was reading during those defining times.
From the time she was a child, Hill (MFA Program/Sarah Lawrence Coll. Who Occupies This House, 2010, etc.) had a sense that events unfolding around her were “inside a story.” The first time she experienced the way life and art mirrored each other was in a seventh-grade music class. Around the time her teacher told students about the accident that ended her career as a concert pianist, Hill immersed herself in Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart. The heroine's accidental drowning prepared the author for the death of a friend’s father, who committed suicide by jumping into the town reservoir. When she was 23, she traveled to Nigeria with her husband to teach. There, she encountered Things Fall Apart and learned about Nigeria’s racist colonial history, all without fully realizing how deeply implicated her own “right-thinking” country was in that brutal past. Reading A Portrait of a Lady cast her own innocence, both about colonial Africa and her own rushed union with her husband, into uncomfortable relief: like slavery, “marriage involved...the desire…to bend another’s will to the requirements of one’s own.” On a later trip to France, the author was drawn to Madame Bovary and the female protagonist who believed that reality “hover[ed] just beyond reach”; and then to Diary of a Country Priest, which offered her insight into how she had been looking at the people around her “through the lens of fear” rather than love. But it would be À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which she read many years later to a nearly blind Diana Trilling, that would cause her to think more deeply about the mysteries of life. Eloquent and searching, Hill’s book explores the strange and wondrous resonances between the read and lived while celebrating reading itself as among the most profoundly transformative of human acts.
A thought-provoking memoir about the significance of literature in life.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-883285-72-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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