I'm struggling to find a voice that's appropriate to talk about Exit Ghost. Finished reading it this morning courtesy of a snow-stopped day and lie in (everything stops around here when it snows). I want to read the rest of the Zuckerman novels for sure. Come to that I want to read all the rest of Philip Roth. There's some great railing against biographers of writers. I agree with him. I read Clare Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy and, although I wanted to know more about Hardy, it really irritated me the way she dug and insinuated with her scabby dry biographer mole claws, trying to dig out the dirt and the sex in Hardy's life. Not that I wasn't interested, but it was the way she shaped her dusty little researches into a sexy little mound, that might be true, might not be, all surmise and selling.
Biographies of politicians, of generals, of scientists yes - but of writers - well I guess I've read them, yes and still will. But not the ones that are bending over backwards to get "an angle", that'll increase the £ and the $, and titillate as much as inform.
On to the next book, that I bought by accident thinking it was an author that had been read in the New Yorker Magazine - the Dirty Havana Trilogy - by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. No need to dig about in this author's biography for the sex and the dirt, it's all there in the fiction. There's a skeletal biography of him in Wikipedia, but his own website is great. It's a shame my Spanish isn't up to reading him in the original language. But it will be. Eventually.
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