Deft, poignant characterizations by an author who deserves a wider readership.
A new translation of Russian novelist Grossman’s delightful journal of his stay among the Armenians.
Composed two years before his death in 1964, this journal records the author’s reflections on the Armenian people among whom he lived for two months in 1961 as a “translator” for a famous Armenian novelist, Rachiya Kochar, although Grossman didn’t speak Armenian. Rather, rewriting his novel in collaboration with the vain, large-living author, Grossman, who was occasionally gripped by bowel trouble from the early stages of kidney cancer he was unaware of, moved among the humble, mountain-dwelling Armenians and found them enormously sympathetic, salt-of-the-earth people whose diversity, national pride and piety contrasted sharply with the Russian temperament. In this sprightly translation by the Chandler husband-and-wife team, who previously tackled Grossman’s Everything Flows and The Road, Grossman’s character sketches, executed with swift, loving strokes, provide simply charming reading. The author digresses as nimbly about the master craftsmen of Russian stoves found in the homes of the high-mountain villagers (“what quantities of bread, what a great deal of cabbage, how much living warmth his stoves have given birth to!”) as he does the touching customs of a rustic wedding he attended. Living among the Armenians, he witnessed a kind of timeless biblical nobility he conveys with artless simplicity in his own work.
Deft, poignant characterizations by an author who deserves a wider readership.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59017-618-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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