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It has been said that It's a wise child that knows his own father, a statement credited to Shakespeare but also to Samuel Butler, though in the process of translating Virgil's Aeneid in high school Latin Class, I thought that I remembered Ascanius making the same comment in reference to Aeneas, or perhaps it was vice versa? The Man Inside My Head by Pico Iyer is a rather masterful excavation of paternal influences, both familial & literary. Having tried & failed to make my way through the author...
Have no clue why I liked this book. But I did.A fair bit did not make any sense, but it was a beautiful fair bit, like the rest of the book. Easily one of the best books by Iyer. (Am a bit surprised he still holds an Indian passport though.)I want to read more Greene though. I stopped after The End of the Affair and Brighton Rock.
I could have written this book. I SHOULD have written this book. I have an enormous collection of Graham Greene's first editions that I have collected for the past 30 years. I carry him around in my head in almost exactly the same way that Pico Iyer does. Not everyone will like this kind of interior writing, but I loved it. Of course, I think that Pico Iyer is one of our best writers today.
"A man within your head whispers his secrets and fears to you, and it can go right to your core, accompanied by flesh and blood; accompanied by flesh and blood, it comes up to the surface..."I know a certain friend of mine on Instagram, a fine young writer and poet by the name of Subhadip Majumdar, to be an ardent admirer of Ernest Hemingway. He calls him his "greatest inspiration" and I wonder, sometimes, what does he mean by that - does he mean that Hemingway's famed "iceberg" prose style and
Full disclosure: By the time this book was published I had become friends with Iyer and had shared with him many of my notions of Graham Greene and how he has existed in my own head and heart for so long. At one point Iyer was considering editing a collection of essays by writers discussing Greene. It seems that by the turn into the 21st Century most writers (note not critics but those who actually WRITE) have pointed to Greene as the greatest of the 20th Century. To quote another brilliant writ...
Just bought this book through Indiebound, just got the phone call, it's in!!!! WOO HOO!!! STAY TUNED**************I had been looking forward to reading this since I met Iyer several years ago at the LA Festival of Books. He was touring with the Dalai Lama book, but what we spoke about was Graham Greene, and the book he wanted to write. A great conversation, far ranging--we talked about Maugham and Greene and Chandler and Anthony Burgess, Long Day Wanes... And every year since then, we've met and...
A tad disappointing.I have been hugely impressed with Pico Iyer's abilities.His books and reviews (especially on japanese literature) have struck me as being very insightful and original. However in this book he seems to fall short on various counts.He seems unable to convey the subtle nuances present in Graham Greene's works.His attempt to interweave his own life story with the works of Greene is very commendable.That said,I feel he fails to go beyond a superficial reading of Greene's great nov...
From BBC Radio 4:The travel writer Pico Iyer (author of Video Nights in Kathmandu, Falling Off The Map) has always wandered the world with a mentor 'looking on'. Whether it be Bogota, Cuba, California, Japan, the man inside Iyer's head, as he puts it, is always Graham Greene. And it is Greene's fights with faith, his reservations about innocence, his generous spirit, that are really inspiring. In the course of five episodes and from various destinations the author describes his fascination for t...
[I have expanded this review a little. I was falling asleep while writing it last night. I'm awake now; awake enough to add some bits at the end, after a row of asterisks.] The first three words of the title of this book form the entire title of Graham Greene's first published novel. Noticing THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD on the shelf at my local library, I instantly thought of THE MAN WITHIN, and took it down off the shelf. I was surprised and delighted to see an image of Graham Greene on the cover, b...
I really enjoyed this book, hence the four stars. It is about Graham Greene for one; it is about the effect books have on our perception of the world as well and those twi would have been enough. However there is more. It is brilliantly well-written, flowing sentences, elegantly structured chapters and a narrative that encompasses English public school life, California's spiritual heartland, Bolivia and if course Greeneland. It is so far ranging it leaves you a bit breathless, like the oxygenles...
The Man Within My Head is an examination of Graham Greene’s role in the author’s life (a man he’s never met but whose novels remarkably intersect with Iyer’s experiences and inner life). It’s about Greene’s life, Iyer’s life, and the life of the author’s father, about the themes of Greene’s work (foreignness, displacement, innocence, detachment) and much more. It’s a thoughtful and fascinating book, one that left me, frankly, gasping.
As someone who follows new modes of writing memoir and mixed genres, and as a fan of Pico Iyer who has read all his books, I was captivated by his new braided biography-memoir about Graham Greene and his influence on Iyer's life. This indirect autobiography through the mirror of another writer's life and work provides insights that, I think, are more nuanced than if stated directly. A note of inevitability carries the pairing, for the two writers lived near each other though they were born at l
It is always interesting when an author like Pico Iyer succeeds in channeling another author, in this case Graham Greene. The Man Within My Head deals with Iyer's lifelong obsession with Greene, an author he never actually met. Yet there were intersecting points and interesting parallels in their respective lives. A Tamil, Iyer was especially drawn to Greene's The Quiet American, about the encounter between a world-weary Brit and an idealistic American who knows exactly what Viet Nam should have...
I really enjoyed this, but that's because Graham Greene is the man within my head, too. If you're not already a Greene aficionado, I'm not sure how much you'll get out of this, but if you are, you'll love it (even if some of Iyer's musings are a little cryptic). It has lots of fun aha! moments ("Oh, that's why I love Graham Greene..."), and is also a nice advertisement for how literature can help you learn more about yourself.
Graham Greene is one of my favourite authors, so I am bound to be biased by anything written about him. And I found this book to be startling in Pico Iyer's insights into Greene and into that in-between country of guilt, doubt, compassion, faithlessness, inscrutability and betrayal we have come to call "Greeneland."Greene's many recurring themes are called out: (1)the visiting foreigner vs. the resident foreigner in an offbeat country, both out of touch with the mother country(2) The relationshi...
I usually try to see the positives in a book, and I usually end up buying or picking out that books I like. This time however, will be an exception. This is the first book I've bought in the last 2 years that I feel was a waste of my money. Watching Iyer's TED talk on identity and home a few months earlier had made me interested in what he had to say, since he too is of Indian descent, loved to travel, and introspected during his travels.To start off, the blurb on the back of the book stated it
If you have read most of Graham Green, you will enjoy this book for the observations about those books that are mixed in to this reminiscence of a man who reads them over and over again. I found the author's observations about his own life less interesting than those about Graham Greene. Sort of a My Life With Julia kind of a tale, where we have a structure that tells us much about one famous person with a lesser figure, the author, also telling about himself. It actually gives a good biography
I enjoyed reading this even amidst clutter of classroom noises and boring lectures of stern professor . in our life , even knowingly or unknowingly , we tend to mould our deeds according to the writings of our literary heroes. they are not just a writer for us, they are friend for us with whom we share our life. for pico iyer , that writer is Graham Greene . he is the man who has shaped his life like no one else. the book is a guide to the minds of both Greene and iyer , more so because of incre...
By Franklin FreemanFor The Literary ReviewSpring 2012 "Encyclopedia Britannica" I have traveled to Greeneland—the land so-called to describe the world Graham Greene wrote of—at least thirteen times, but lately I have been more interested in reading travel books about this place than in going there. Perhaps this is because I read a lot of his books when I was younger and have tended to agree with Martin Amis that Greene is a writer you think profound when young but, when older, you’re not so sure...
Iyer is has some genuinely interesting insights into Greene and his work, but for some reason his style becomes painfully awkward when he writes about himself. He often reverts to the worst sort of memoir-prose that is characterized by the overwritten banal observation of the why-use-one-adjective-when-two-will-do school. He somewhat redeems himself with the last twenty pages or so.