Poetic, graceful, and full of hard-won knowledge.
A luminous memoir of an unusual life in an unlikely place.
Graves, daughter and translator of the famed poet and novelist Robert Graves, spent her early life in Majorca, where her father had installed the family in bohemian exile from England. That their romanticized getaway happened to fall under the dominion of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco seems not to have troubled Graves senior, a nominal socialist, although Lucia gives a terrifying account of her school years, a time when fierce nuns spoke of the generalissimo as if he were Christ restored to earth and instructed their pupils “that the Jews, who hated the Spaniards and were political spies and conspirators, had secret dealings with the Moors and murdered Christian children.” Undaunted, Lucia grew up to be a good cosmopolitan and democrat, keenly appreciative of the many differences that distinguish Catalonia from the Balearic Islands, and both from Castile. (In Catalonian hospitals, she writes, the dominant symbol is not the cross, as it is in Madrid, but an almond-shaped eye, borrowed from ancient Egyptian iconography.) Her portrait of the reemergence of Catalan identity after Franco’s death offers a learned insight into this proud people, while her descriptions of daily life in rural Spain will inspire nostalgia in readers who have traveled there. Those hoping for dirt on the renowned author of I, Claudius will be disappointed, however, for Robert Graves appears only in passing in these pages, a generally benevolent but always distant figure. Instead, Lucia Graves lingers on her own epiphanies as a child, and then as an adult, familiar with many cultures but wholly at home in none, “immersed in a textual world” that takes in all times and peoples.
Poetic, graceful, and full of hard-won knowledge.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-097-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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