Breezy reading that’s also a commentary on breezy reading. Some trick.
Knausgaard closes his quartet of autobiographical meditations on the seasons in an appropriately verdant and optimistic fashion.
The author likes a big finish: The concluding volume of his landmark My Struggle series cracked 1,100 pages, and this volume is substantially longer than its three predecessors (Autumn, 2017; Winter, 2018; Spring, 2018). As in Autumn and Winter, the book is rooted in brief essays contemplating and anthropomorphizing objects of everyday existence: slugs, tears, wasps, Sting CDs that reveal the chasm between “myself and the person I was thirty years ago.” The riffs are typically light, at times willfully frivolous (“has a single good author ever owned a dog?”), at others more thought-provoking and counterintuitive. Playgrounds, for instance, are imagination-stifling spaces “whose order and formulaic reason is a kind of bureaucratic utopia.” The book’s serious side—and much of its heft—is contained in lengthy diary entries in which Knausgaard contemplates his health, his children, his work, and especially his family history. Having recently observed a brain surgeon at work for a magazine story, the nature of consciousness is much on his mind (he’s reading a lot of Emanuel Swedenborg), and despite having written reams of prose that straddle the line between fiction and memoir, he’s still sorting out what defines such writing and how honest it can be. To get out of his own head, the author writes a fictionalization of the courtship between his grandparents after World War II, a story that turns out to be thick with lust, betrayal, and violence of Shakespearean proportions. “I am bad at writing imaginatively,” Knausgaard insists, but this is a bluff: He knows that while interrogating the nature of storytelling, he’s priming readers for a powerful, straightforward yarn.
Breezy reading that’s also a commentary on breezy reading. Some trick.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56339-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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