Hilarious collection of letters by the Russian-American maestro that must rank as one of the most contentious and eccentric of all time. While there are no hefty literary gems here—Nabokov's letters tend to be small, albeit glittery with intelligence, gleaming with style—fans of perverse masterpieces like Lolita and Ada won't be disappointed. Nabokov loved to duel, frolic, and tease. Consider his evaluations of Dr. Zhivago ("that trashy, melodramatic, false and inept book") and Robert Lowell ("l do not mind Robert Lowell's disliking my books, but I wish he would stop mutilating his betters—Mandelshtam, Rimbaud, and others. I regret not having entitled my article 'Rhyme and Punishment'"). Or his response when asked what he'd like Neil Armstrong to say on the moon: "I want a lump in his throat to obstruct the wisecrack." Or the jingle he sent in unsolicited to the Burma-Shave company: "He passed two cars; then five; then seven;/and then he beat them all to Heaven." Other letters skirt the edge of his massive war with Edmund Wilson (the main battles don't see print here); detail his run-ins with prudes over the publication of Lolita; trace his triple careers as lepidopterist, novelist, professor. Even his political naivet‚ acquires in hindsight a certain quaint charm, as in this 1965 telegram to an ailing President Johnson: "Wishing you a perfect recovery and a speedy return to the admirable work you are accomplishing." All in all, the portrait emerges of a brilliant, fussy, combative iconoclast who adopted a literary persona (filled with laughter, thank goodness) at an early age and never afterwards dropped his mask. Devilish and baroque. In other words, classic Nabokov.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1989
ISBN: 0156936100
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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
SEEN & HEARD
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