Word: memoire
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...about a lonely boy growing up in England just after World War I, Anthony West should not be plagued by any novel reader's knowledge that the author is the natural son of Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. Yet the book, which seems to be a fictional memoir, is profoundly preoccupied with its hero's growing awareness that the woman posing as his aunt is really his mother, and that he himself knows nothing about his father. Born in 1914, West is a semi-public figure in the U.S. For almost 20 years he has been...
...itself. In fact, the grandiosity of his architectural fantasy belongs to a whole tradition of visionary architecture, which encompasses idealist architects like the 18th century Frenchmen Boullée and Ledoux as well as the great Italian engraver Piranesi, who saw grandeur in prisons, glory in ruins. (In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Speer notes that Hitler took into account how his edifices might look as ruins a thousand years later.) And a debased 18th century neoclassicism, in fact, has long been the universal language of political power from Leningrad to Paris-and even Washington...
...handsome jacket, Two Sisters is called "A Novel in the Form of a Memoir." Inside, however, a subtitle asserts that the book is "A Memoir in the Form of a Novel." Either one will do, although readers who know something about the author's life and works may prefer the second. Outwardly combining a tale of two status-seeking females in ancient Greece with what appear to be recollections from his own life, Vidal contrives to use himself both as narrator and fictional character...
...only useful form left to literature in the post-Gutenberg age is the memoir: the absolute truth, copied precisely from life, preferably at the moment it is happening...
Eric is the startlingly handsome twin brother of startlingly beautiful Erika, and the father of her child after a love affair of many years. The Vidal of the novel-in-the-form-of-a-memoir-or vice versa-had sex with Erika too. He was also attracted to Eric, though they never quite made it to bed. In addition, there is Marietta Donegal, an aging mystical novelist who was once lover to both men. The incest angle is best read as a suborbital send-up of Ada, Vladimir Nabokov's incestuous riddle of time and memory. For starters there...