English Original from 1996: "Kafka was all the rage"

Got a few laughs out of this book ( )

A waste of time and a waste of talent: 147 pages of namedropping and posing, filled with self-revelation that feels phony and superficial, and very little broader insight or depth of field. But when I read Henry Louis Gates' biographical essay "The Passing of Anatole Broyard," I got it. I realized there was nothing I could trust about this author, and his evasions infected his writing. What is the point of trying to read an autobiographical book by a guy who spent his life perfecting a fictional self to present to the world? Gates actually does a better job than Broyard of making him sympathetic, or at least an intriguing character study. Only when Broyard talks about books does any depth of feeling or integrity flicker in his writing. His life story is the essence of poetic justice - he was never able to fulfill his promise as a writer because his only real subject was himself, and he refused to acknowledge who that was. ( )

After World War II, Greenwich Village became the center of the bohemian revolution in America. Artistic twenty-somethings flocked to the New York neighborhood in droves. It drew them in the same way Paris had drawn their predecessors in the 1920s.

Broyard returned from serving in the war to find that the country had changed in his absence. He, like so many others, made his way to Greenwich, where he pursued his dream of opening a bookstore.

“Looking back at the late 1940s, it seems to me now that Americans were confronting their loneliness for the first time. Loneliness was like the morning after the war, like a great hangover. The war had broken the rhythm of American life, and when we tried to pick it up again, we couldn’t find it – it wasn’t there.”

The sense of loneliness the author speaks about is palpable in this book. He explores his odd relationship with a self-involved woman that seems to leave him feeling more alone when he’s with her than when he isn’t.

I liked a few passages from this memoir more than I liked it as a whole. It gave me a better picture of the history of Greenwich Village and I’m glad I read it before spending more time in the area, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a general read.

“To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world.”

“Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.” ( )

A birthday present from my sister! Thanks sister.I wavered on whether or not I liked Broyard's outlook as a memoirist. There are some excellent thoughts and sentences like "When would I come to the end of her originality?" And I appreciate views like his from lovers of New York City, which is different to each person let alone to each decade. I pretty much couldn't picture anything at all about being here in 1946 and 1947, and now I can imagine at least a little. This description is exemplary: "The Village was charming, shabby, intimate, accessible, almost like a street fair." I learned about this book from a list of best books about New York, and that honor fits well enough. But his experiences aren't really so extraordinary, and his situation with Sheri is unappetizing at the very least, so as a memoir, it is somewhat in the middle.And he says a few things so stupid they called into question his entire legitimacy to me. Though giving almost no characterization of himself beyond a literary passion, that all he and his friends cared about is literature and they breathed literature and confused sex and literature and he ran a bookshop and he reviewed books and it was the time of the earth of literature, he can yet produce a posturing portrayal such as claiming women in the 1940's "were 'good' girls whose sexuality had been shaped by their mothers and by the novels of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf." Uh. Are you kidding around with me Anatole? I don't pretend to be a quarter of the expert you do, but I've read a couple of those novels myself, and I don't think they mean what you think they mean. AT ALL. 0%. But, his aphorisms are honest sometimes, like comparing the women's silence (cultural, literal) to "another form of virginity."And still, the contemporary parallels are too interesting to discredit. Like publishing an article called "Portrait of a Hipster". ! And the fact that he used the GI Bill to go to the New School, which I attended very very differently. (And yet.) In fact, I'm very surprised I wasn't assigned this book in a memoir class I took my first semester. But that's life. ( )