Deft and stylish.
A Swedish writer and poet well known in her native land makes her U.S. debut with a serenely ironic memoir about life in a small Breton town.
In 2000, 55-year-old Malmsten took her Swedish pension and headed south from central Norrland on the trans-European motorway to find a new life. She carried little with her except a love of history and a sense of social justice, qualities evident throughout these delightfully meandering reflections. Somewhere near Brest, in France, Malmsten discovered a parcel of paradise “where the land comes to an end in Europe—fin des terres, finis terrae—Finistère” and proceeded to dig in. She gradually fashioned an elaborate garden (despite the high price of water) with the help of gardening books in several languages, plans she drew up herself and well-meaning neighbors eager to dispense advice. One important daily visitor was the exquisitely elegant widow Madame C, who gently corrected the author’s French-in-progress and first planted the idea of writing a book about Finistère. The author reflects here on the advantages and disadvantages of being a stranger. She describes the Swedish welfare state and a maddening confrontation with the Social Insurance Office (dubbed by its victims “the Social Insulting Office”) that led to her emigration. She portrays the family members who have shaped her character: Grandma, who had large hands and a beautiful peony garden, and Malmsten’s privileged father, who joined the international socialist organization Clarté in the 1930s. The author shared his principles enough to abruptly break with Monsieur Le R, a fellow gardener and admirer, when he revealed a racist nature. Yet in her text she expresses both admiration and revulsion for Sultan Mehmet of Istanbul, a brutal dictator but a gorgeous gardener. No matter how serious her reflections, Malmsten always delivers them with a light touch, and she’s perfectly willing to laugh at herself, especially when recounting hilarious faux pas in her adopted language.
Deft and stylish.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-84343-164-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvill UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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