My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Huff. It’s been almost 8 months since I read Into the Wild and I still haven’t reviewed it. OK. Let me look at the little notes I took while reading it so I could remember the points I wanted to make about it before giving it back to its rightful owner, the Dutch girl Rian who, before lending it to me, told me that it’s in her top five books.
Hey, why not copy the notes here?
*He’s received unwarranted flak. Like Thoreau, criticism against him is really against an idea he never supported explicitly.
*Krakauer fantastic reporter/researcher. Weaves everything together, including personal and parallel/related stories, convincingly.
*Started reading at 17:30. Read the whole book in more or less 6 hours in almost a single sitting.
*Quotes at beginning of each chapter great addition—include McCandless’s own notes and favourite quotes.
*What if Krakauer had died in his own mountain climbing story he retells in the book? Would we have ever heard about Alex Supertramp?
*Similarly, if Christopher McCandless hadn’t died, then his story wouldn’t have become known. There are countless others who live the life he wanted to (and for a time, did) live, but they are virtually unknown to all but few.
*Arrogance? Indignation of his father? What exactly was the final straw that pushed him into the wild?
Then there’s Daphne’s notes who also read the book before I gave it back to Rian. She can take care of those, if she wishes.
What I can say is that McCandless is a very controversial figure. You either love him or hate him, and I’ve noticed that people’s opinion on him have very different sources. Some admire him for his courage to abandon his reality and/or prospects of what most would consider a successful and happy life, in order to venture out and into the “real” life. Others believe that his greatest achievement was to live as long as he did the way he did, that he was a free spirit, an example for all.
Then there’s those who say that Alex Supertramp’s story was just a glorified suicide, that a great part of his story has been misrepresented, especially through the movie. They dislike him for his unwarranted fame and his selfishness for abandoning his family and good fortune.
What I can say is that I’m torn. I wouldn’t call his story a glorified suicide. Perhaps it was until or after some point, but right before the end it seems that he’d learned his lesson, the famous “Happiness only real when shared”. It’s interesting that he ultimately didn’t care whether he’d die or not having chosen to live the way he did, but for crying out loud, he was practically next to civilization when he chose to live in that school bus! Some preparation could have saved him his life… if he wanted to survive, that is. Again, perhaps it had started out as a suicide before Supertramp realised what he’d got himself into and what he had really left behind.
My biggest takeaway from the book isn’t the story of the human thirst for freedom and adventure, nor the idea that “the system can be hacked, what are you waiting for?!”. It’s the notion that people naturally glorify death and dying for one’s alleged cause. That makes all the difference.
