Word: memoirs
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Present Past Past Present is the opposite of mirth. lonesco takes everything so seriously there is no room left for humor, and lonesco is so devastated by his existence all he can do is groan. Subtitled "A Personal Memoir", this book is the sequel to his autobiographical first volume Fragments of a Journal. It starts with flashes from lonesco's youth that run from a few lines to a few pages and then becomes a mix of his impressions at the beginning of World War Two, his thoughts about Israel and French intellectuals. lonesco not only sees what is hypocritical...
Greene says that his motive in writing this memoir is the same one that has made him a novelist: "a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order." But even a great novelist cannot reduce his life to the same kind of order that he achieves in his fictional characters. This might be the reason for my slight feeling of dissatisfaction with A Sort of Life. All the ingredients of a Greene novel are there: the Manichean universe, the existential hero never quite in control of his life, the grubby side of espionage. But Greene...
There is a myth that needs unmaking, and if we are to believe A. Alvarez's "Sylvia Plath: A Memoir" published in the New American Review 12, there is a hope that needs establishing. Sylvia Plath's life is closed to us, and so, therefore, is the truth about her life; we are left with some incomplete facts, a few more every day, her poetry, and the hope with which we construe the tale...
...parts of this memoir that deal with My Lai are mainly taken verbatim from Lieut. Calley's trial testimony. Readers who like to see Calley as scapegoat and martyr can read again his claim that the star prosecution witnesses were lying, and reflect on the lieutenant's reassertion that at My Lai he was acting not as a responsible individual but as the blind agent of the American people. What makes the book interesting are Calley's recollections of the months before and after...
...ironic that the Calley memoir should produce funny and persuasive accounts of the frustrations that came from trooping around the rain forests of Southeast Asia. The first time he called for a full-sized field artillery strike he was bowled over. "BOOMBOOM! BOOMBOOM! And the world lit up: the house, the trees, the world was blowing away. It was a slow-motion movie of some atomic bomb, and I knew everyone in America had heard it. President Johnson! Congress...