Word: memoire
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Autobiographies tend to fall into three broad categories: lives of the rich and famous, twisted tales of the dysfunctional and portraits of artists as young scamps. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, the new memoir by J.M. Coetzee, a South African novelist and Booker Prize-winner, ostensibly falls into the final category. In this short and elegantly written book, Coetzee chronicles his childhood in Worcester, a dusty settlement outside of Cape Town. Between the ages of eight and thirteen, the young Coetzee struggles with his Afrikaans identity, quarrels with his parents and pursues a secret double-life...
Annaud's version of the Harrer memoir, Seven Years in Tibet, is true to the compulsions and contradictions in each man. It has exciting, boy's-life-perils footage of men risking their necks (and breaking a leg) for the suicidal glory of getting to the top of something they can only come down from--the high before the depression. It documents the stubborn spirit of a fellow contemptuous of compromise, almost of humanity, and his rebirth in a land where each desolation dissolves in beatific smiles. It is about a solitary star, trussed in celebrity, who learns...
Most famous for Europa, Europa, an almost-unclassifiable German historical drama-cum-comic-childhood-memoir, Holland has also directed films ranging from Olivier, Olivier, a French psychological thriller, to Fever, a pro-revolutionary Polish drama, and even found time for the 1994 English-language children's movie The Secret Garden...
...almost as if Vonnegut wrote a novel, decided it was crap, then wrote a sort of disjointed memoir over it, using elements of the original book to illustrate (or simply to accompany) assorted observations and opinions...
...captain's wife with whom he had a doomed, adulterous affair in Hawaii "put her mark on me" in a subtle, feminine way by choosing the girl he would wed. But what was the girl's name, and how did that marriage dissolve? In the preface to his memoir, Salter raises, but then brushes aside, the possibility that what one chooses to forget might be as important as what one elects to remember. In light of the book's lacunae, that is a provocative disclaimer...