In sharing the experience of solitude and reflection, Sjöberg invites readers to see through his eyes, in language that is...
A literary memoir by the Swedish author, a man who lives on an island and collects flies, reflecting on the significance of his obsession.
Both an entomologist and a literary critic, Sjöberg blurs the border between these two vocations while exploring plenty of other territory as well. “Here and there, my story is about something else,” he admits. “Exactly what, I don’t know.” Readers will share his uncertainty, as he proceeds like one of his beloved hoverflies, flitting from his experiences on an island east of Stockholm to his meditations on time, concentration, and the language of geography to his literary appreciations of D.H. Lawrence, Milan Kundera, and Bruce Chatwin to his investigations into the life of an obscure naturalist–turned–art collector. The author recognizes that devoting his life to flies might not have the romantic resonance with readers that butterflies would, but he finds himself within a realm where “everything flies, absolutely everything,” a world that can be read as “a thousand commentaries. An entire apparatus of footnotes.” Most of the book takes place within the mind of the author—the connections he makes and the implications he finds—though sometimes he ventures out to provide naturalistic detail of his life on the island or historical inquiry into the lives of entomologists with whom he seems to be having more of a conversation than with any of his living contemporaries. In a rare encounter with another human, who asks what he is doing and why, he reflects, “It is at such moments that the entomologist becomes a story-teller. He is prepared to do almost anything to get someone to listen and perhaps understand. He is prepared to use any ruse or artifice to avoid being the only one who sees.”
In sharing the experience of solitude and reflection, Sjöberg invites readers to see through his eyes, in language that is often poetic, sometimes inscrutable.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87015-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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