Word: memoire
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...constructed like tumbleweed. Moving On, the last one, was 794 arbitrary pages long, with no discernible direction. All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers is less than half that length. It is acute, elegiac, funny and dangerously tender, and in tone -if not content-more like a memoir than a novel...
...concludes with "There and Back," Trotsky's account of his Siberian escape in a reindeer sled driven by a drunken peasant. With politics temporarily given a back seat, the memoir is a literary achievement of great quality - proving again that there is nothing like a subzero dash over the snow to bring out the best in a Russian writer...
...there is something more important, more durable about The Catcher in the Rye. In the interstices of the memoir were seedling predictions, just waiting for the rain. And it came, it came. Take my love/hate for movies. Wouldn't you know that College English would run a piece, without irony, suggesting that my name, "one suspects"-one maybe, two never-"is an amalgam of the last names of Movie Stars William Holden and Joan Caulfield." Yeah, well . . . And yet my obsessive cinematic fantasies were really everyone's hang-up with nostalgia, camp and collective memory. Remember me camping...
General George Patton, among others, thought that Mauldin's attitude toward discipline and authority was subversive. The funniest scene in this often funny book-which Mauldin calls "a sort of a memoir"-is the confrontation between the 23-year-old cartoonist and the famous general. "Now then, sergeant," Patton says in his most tolerant tone, "about those god-awful things you call soldiers. You know goddamn well you're not drawing an accurate representation of the American soldier. You make them look like goddamn bums. No respect for the army, their officers, or themselves. You know as well...
...childhood with its Levantine eccentricities might have come from Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. The son of a peripatetic Sicilian engineer, a man of fiery temperament much given to dueling, De Chirico was born in Greece and constantly moved house. "In my life," he observed in a memoir, "there is some thing fatal which makes me change addresses." The character of these years - a melancholic idyll of transience, conducted in a series of sirocco-damp villas across a classical landscape - is built into his early paintings. It was reinforced when, as an art student in Munich, he encountered the dreamlike...