A valuable resource much better suited to the classroom than the nightstand.
A close reading of several of Auster’s works as rendered through transcribed interviews between the author and scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt.
Few contemporary novelists are studied as rigorously as Auster (4 3 2 1, 2017, etc.), particularly in Europe. There are more than 40 scholarly texts about his work, and Siegumfeldt recently opened the Center for Paul Auster Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where she is a professor of English, Germanic, and Romance Studies; this book adds another level to the discourse. In many ways, it’s an unlikely project for Auster, who has a notoriously tenuous relationship with critics, and his hesitation is apparent in many of his answers—e.g., “a writer can’t analyze his own work,” he says to Siegumfeldt in the prologue—particularly in the first half of the book, which is devoted to Auster’s memoirs and autobiographical work, including The Red Notebook (2002) and Winter Journal (2012). But Siegumfeldt is a dogged interviewer with an encyclopedic knowledge of Auster’s work, and she is mostly able to break down those barriers. Though the tone is casual and the banter between them feels mostly conversational, nonscholarly readers may find the going tough. (For Auster enthusiasts just looking to spend time in his company, Here and Now, his 2013 collection of letters exchanged with J.M. Coetzee, is a better fit.) Rather, the chapters are detailed and rely on a precise and current knowledge of Auster’s body of work. To get anything out of the conversation, it’s almost imperative to read each chapter alongside the corresponding Auster text. While some readers might be overjoyed at insights that come straight from the author, hearing his interpretation of his own fiction does, in some ways, leave little room for the reader’s own imagination.
A valuable resource much better suited to the classroom than the nightstand.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60980-777-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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