Though some of his early fiction is autobiographical, Naipual seems uncomfortable when writing about himself—and the first of the two pieces here, "Prologue to an Autobiography," is a circuitous account of "my literary beginnings and the imaginative promptings of my many-sided background." Naipaul starts with the mid-1950s day when he drafted his first publishable story, writing in a room at London's BBC and nervously showing the pages to three encouraging young colleagues. ("Such anxiety; such ambition.") The story's subject-matter—his childhood street, the adventurous yearnings of a family friend named "Bogart"—lead him back to memories of Trinidad; his literary strivings lead him back to memories of his tormented father, a sometime journalist (whose old clippings inspired V.S. to love "the idea of print") and unpublished story-writer—whose longest tale became "the greatest imaginative experience" of his childhood. ("Every new bit was read out to me, every little variation; and I read every new typescript my father made as the story grew.") But then Naipaul goes on to record how all of his childhood notions had to be revised, often as part of the discovery-process involved in writing. For his career, that "noble thing," he felt he had to leave the limited culture of Trinidad's Indian community—but actually "it was necessary to go back." Likewise, a 1970s reunion with the once-adventurous Bogart character—who fled Trinidad for cosmopolitan Venezuela only to find dreariness and rootlessness—underlines the difficulty of leaving a native tradition behind. And finally the focus returns to the journalist-father—as Naipual discovers new facts about him in the 1970s: his progressive ideas, which earned him the hostility of his strict, devout Hindu family ("a totalitarian organization"); a dreadful humiliation, when he was forced to kowtow to tribal magic (an actual N. Y. Herald Tribune headline, 6/24/33: "REPORTER SACRIFICES GOAT TO MOLLIFY HINDU GODDESS"); and the mental instability that ensued—a panic that Naipaul now links to the "center" of his own not-so-simple ambition. The second piece, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro," picks up on this theme of tribal magic vs. European-style progress—and runs it into the ground somewhat. Naipaul visits the Ivory Coast, one of West Africa's success stories: economic health, benevolent dictator/one-party system, skyscrapers. But, in talking to several residents (including two intriguingly displaced West Indian women), he finds that the Africans still live more in the spirit-world than the Europeans' "real" one—with magic and ritual symbolized by the sacred crocodiles outside the Presidential Palace, fed on live chickens in public ceremonies. Still, if Naipaul belabors this familiar theme (with its implicit distaste for tribal ways), the travelogue is rich in edgy people and shrewd background-details. And though "Prologue to an Autobiography" is too self-consciously structured to be affecting, its curious/charming fragments provide rare personal close-ups of a major writer.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1984
ISBN: 0140073957
Page Count: 159
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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