A short memoir that moves readers on multiple levels.
A provocative memoir about coming to terms with not only the life and death of the author’s father, but also with writing about it as honestly as possible.
A prizewinning novelist in his native Spain, Torrente (The End of Love, 2013, etc.) has drawn from his own life in his fiction, and he admits that he used his writing as a “weapon” against the father who left his mother for another woman and whose contact with his son was infrequent for decades. “Triangulation, concealment, exaggeration, cross-contamination….The fact is that I used my father,” he writes. “The substance of the book grew out of our deepest misunderstandings.” However, he continues, “[f]iction, even when it’s inspired by reality, obeys its own rules. It alters reality by pursuing different ends than those of fidelity to the truth.” This, then, is a book about discovery, of new rules, of a different, more authentic voice than the one in the fiction. It’s also a book about how the relationship between father and son came full circle, with the former’s failing health and the latter assuming the role of primary caretaker. And it’s a book about the creative process—the father was a painter who experienced shifts in critical reception as his son’s career was on the rise—about blood ties and competition, and inevitably about the contemplation of one’s own mortality. “The dead leave sadness and not a few questions behind them,” writes Torrente. “They oblige us to contemplate our own death, and, at the same time, the futility of life, but in the face of the inarguable reality that everything comes to an end, that there’s no redemption, that what wasn’t done can no longer be done, our understanding fails us.” Unsentimental and unflinching, the book is also about a son’s love for his father and about the time lost to tension and estrangement that he wishes he had back.
A short memoir that moves readers on multiple levels.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-27771-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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