An idiosyncratic but morally serious autobiography from noted British novelist and biographer Mosley (Hopeful Monsters, 1991, etc.) that is more a search for meaning in both life and art than a conventional rÇsumÇ of milestones. Mosley claims he wrote the book ``to see the partnership between learning and life, between experience and what is made of life, to see that one never gets to the end of unveiling smokescreens and presuppositions but it is in this attempt that there is a validity of being human.'' His childhood was, to say the least, unusual: His mother, daughter of Raj Viceroy Lord Curzon and an American heiress, died when he was nine, and his father, the notorious British fascist leader, was imprisoned during WW II; but the autobiographer is more intent on fulfilling his promised intellectual agenda. He begins with his youthful, idealistic first marriage in 1947, which also marks the start of his literary life as he writes novels first in the Caribbean, then in Wales, and finally in their country home near London. The couple was independently wealthy, and this lack of financial cares perhaps increased the sense of isolation from the mundane that characterizes Mosley's life and writing. He describes with agonizing scrupulousness his writing projects, his troubling but irresistible infidelities, his religious quest, and his estrangement from and subsequent reconciliation with his father. By middle age he had moved on from formal religion to psychoanalysis and a preoccupation with the patterns that lurk behind the ``smokescreens of [his] memory and verbiage''—ideas that would further evolve in his recent Catastrophe novels. He ends in the present, certain ``that if one trusts, then things may indeed work out in proper, if mysterious, ways.'' Quirky and at times tedious in exposition, but always honest and intellectually provocative. An autobiography that unflinchingly bares both the heart and the soul.
Pub Date: June 3, 1995
ISBN: 1-56478-075-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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