An illuminating book built, like its subject’s life, on small episodes rather than great, dramatic turning points. Essential...
Conclusion of a massive, comprehensive life of the famed Czech/German/Jewish writer, chockablock with neuroses, failures and moments of brilliance.
The editor of Kafka’s collected works in German, Stach (Kafka: The Decisive Years, 2005, etc.) delivers much that is known about the writer: his sexual insecurities; his fraught, near-paralyzing relationship with his father; the terrible fate of his beloved sisters in the Holocaust. We knew from Max Brod, to say nothing of Kafka’s own correspondence, that he could be clinically cold, and clinically odd, as when he wrote to his one-time intended Felice Bauer, “Your last letter said that a picture was enclosed. It was not enclosed. This represents a hardship for me.” Yet there are surprises as well: Who knew, for instance, that Kafka, though gravely ill, was still athletic enough to row a passenger across a swiftly flowing river? Kafka was, of course, ever anonymous in doing so: “It would never have occurred to the man that he might have been rowed by a thirty-seven-year-old with a doctorate in law, who served as head of his department and suffered from tuberculosis.” Stach also reveals Kafka’s efforts to join the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, thwarted by his employer, and offers a trove of observations on Kafka and the business of writing and publishing, with all the usual complaints about late and underpaid royalties and skewed contracts. Throughout, Stach considers Kafka’s flourishing as a writer, precise but deeply emotional, in a time of works such as The Castle and “The Metamorphosis.” He also sheds light on Kafka’s sometimes-tenuous Zionism, including his concentrated studies of Hebrew and on-and-off plans to relocate to Palestine.
An illuminating book built, like its subject’s life, on small episodes rather than great, dramatic turning points. Essential for students and serious readers of Kafka.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-691-14751-2
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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