A satisfying mystery that could have been grist for Agatha Christie’s mill.
The art critic for the Observer explores family secrets stretching back 90 years.
In the fall of 1929, writes Cumming (The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, 2016), a 3-year-old girl “was playing by herself with a new tin spade” on a Lincolnshire beach, her mother at her side—until, for a moment, the girl dropped out of her sight and was coaxed away by someone watching nearby, “so fast that she couldn’t have got anywhere near the water.” The girl, who would become the author’s mother, the artist Betty Elston, did not drown; she turned up a few days later. Cumming probes her memory and investigates family albums in an attempt to determine what happened. What she turns up is a secret betrayal on the part of her grandfather to which her grandmother must have surrendered, thinking it “her Christian duty” but likely having had no choice but to do so. The facts of the story and their resolution command attention, but in the end, they’re less interesting than the author’s process of thinking about them. As she looks at photo albums with the eye of a scholarly detective, she discerns patterns of gaps and absences, sees eyes averted, a countenance “reluctant or evasive,” and reads between the lines. Those photographs from the past connect generations in a one-way conversation even as present-day readers, saturated in color, look at monochrome photographs as if the world of their subjects were colorless too: “The mind knows this is false,” writes Cumming, “but the optic nerve is fooled into finding these figures less real, immediate, vital. Monochrome turns the present into the past; makes the past look even more distant.” Her nuanced, pensive account restores reality and vitality to figures from out of the past, making them meaningful while uncovering their secrets.
A satisfying mystery that could have been grist for Agatha Christie’s mill.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9871-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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