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Memoirs: Unsentimental Journey
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 26, 2009 01:19am |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | Richard Stengel |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Monday, October 9, 1995 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | As host of the crowded cocktail party that is his memoir, Gore Vidal is mostly on his best behavior. He seldom scandalizes his guests and rarely flings a martini into anyone's face. Courtly but gossipy, chummy but not overfamiliar, he proudly points out all the notables he has managed to attract to his soiree. Yet, while there is a good deal of pleasurable ogling to be had, Vidal's book is the sort of grand, teeming affair that leaves you feeling vaguely unsatisfied, as though you are not quite sure why he invited you in the first place.
Vidal turns 70 this month, a fitting time for a man of letters to turn his hand to recollections. But in Palimpsest (Random House; 438 pages; $27.50), he proves a reluctant memoirist. Elsewhere he has confessed that he only embarked on this book in order to stay a step ahead of two biographers. For Vidal the resurrection of his early life (the story ends when he is 39) seems to be an irksome enterprise, and the book reads that way.
Vidal is a first-rate essayist, one of America's finest, though a rather more pedestrian novelist and playwright. His memoir lacks the sharp, confident voice of his essays, while the characters, like those in his novels and plays, often come across as wooden and two dimensional. He complains over and over to the reader of his frayed memory, his disinclination to look backward, his lack of a diary (he relies altogether too much on other people's memoirs instead). As a result, Palimpsest has a kind of haphazard feel, with the present frequently intruding upon the past in a way that distracts from his narrative. |
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