Lively's experience as an English child in Egypt (and briefly, Sudan, Palestine, and exotic en routes) is perceived and pursued through the stubborn opacity of adult memory, longing for ``the rainbow experience we all have lost but of which we occasionally retrieve a brilliant glimpse.'' It is novelist Lively's (Cleopatra's Sister, 1993, etc.) aim to discuss ``the nature of childhood perception and a view of Egypt in the 1930's and 1940's.'' She richly and elegantly succeeds. The child's vision of the world, declares Lively, is anarchistic, focusing on the moment; the child sees an unpredictable world in which anything is possible. The Egyptian landscape (bright green, gray/green, and tawny) held ``endless pilgrimages'' of animals and people, the smell of dust and dung. About the different ways of the natives, the intimate yet somewhat puzzling relationship with servants, Lively writes: ``This was the world. How could it be otherwise?'' To the young Penelope, her parents—career banker father, fashionably idle mother—were ``peripheral''; nanny Lucy was her whole emotional world. Like every child, Penelope was faced with the complex codes of adult society. Certainly English was best, but what about an English friend in the Brownies who shouldn't be invited to tea? (Lively recalls puzzled but quiet acquiescence.) Throughout the tumult of desert wars, Penelope and Lucy struggle to conquer math and history; in Cairo (the pyramids were after all just pyramids), they feed an elephant who accepts peanuts with a trunk ``warm and hairy and deft.'' There's an interesting ``collision'' between recovered perception and received history, however, in a nine-year-old's view of Charles de Gaulle, sponge in hand, on his way to the bath of a Jerusalem hotel. There is such strength in Lively's ``statements'' from the past—the long desert roads, sensuous Khartoum, Alexandria—that when she records the 1945 return to England—''the inconceivable cold, the perpetually leaking sky''—the reader feels the chill. A quite stunning meditation on the archaeology of memory and time's predations—persistent concerns in Lively's recent, superior fiction. (16 pages b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017106-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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