Kingston is clearly tuned in to a different frequency, and the rhythm of her writing complements her tone, but it’s also...
Renowned Asian-American author Kingston (The Fifth Book of Peace, 2003, etc.) reflects on her life, as well as the lives of her most popular fictional characters, in this 240-page elegy.
The author began this book weeks before her 65th birthday, inspired by the notion of simultaneously gaining and losing time. Having named the protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey (1989) Wittman Ah Sing, in honor of Walt Whitman, she again tips her hat to the American poet by styling this memoir as verse. (The title is a line from Thoreau’s Walden that hangs above her desk.) As with her previous books, Kingston explores cultural and familial identity, albeit in a highly unconventional way. Weaving together seemingly disparate subjects, from the death toll of the Iraq War to details about her marriage, she repeatedly articulates an urgent need to translate her deceased father’s writings from Chinese to English. “How to leave you who love me?” she asks, before answering her own question with the directive to, “Do so in story. For the writer, / doing something in fiction is the same as doing / it in life.” This opens up to her unearthing of the protagonists of The Woman Warrior (1976) and Tripmaster Monkey, and she offers updates on what has become of them. The meandering, meditative nature of the narrative is reminiscent of a journal filled with nonsequiturs and sketches, but it lacks a compelling structure. She spirals away from coherent thoughts and memories with lines like, “Soul through and through rocks, / mountains, ranges and ranges of mountains.” There are moments of real honesty and interest, as when she lists the three surprising reasons she continues to live (e.g., “Kill myself, and I set a bad example / to children and everyone who knows me.”), but these glimmers are outnumbered by scattered snippets that lack cohesion.
Kingston is clearly tuned in to a different frequency, and the rhythm of her writing complements her tone, but it’s also erratic and lacks narrative traction.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-27019-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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