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Cargando... The journal of Andrew Bihalypor Andrew Bihaly, andrew bihaly
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Diary of a young misfit who lived in Manhattan in the late 1960s. Although many of his acquaintances were true hippies who lived without jobs, Andrew was employed sporadically and sometimes used his money to buy food to give away in public parks. His dark moods alternate with idealistic dreams of helping to build a better world. Eventually his inner demons led him to suicide. If you have ever had trouble finding a way to integrate yourself into society you will probably find some passages in this book that resonate with you. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
"The eerie feeling one gets on reading this, sad, selflacerating journal of a lonely young man's cockroach's existence in a New York room, is that if he had not killed himself no publisher would have touched his book with a bargepole. Publication might have saved him. He felt he was a failure. An early entry goes: Today for the first time in my life I smelled gas. For suicide. It does not smell bad. But in a world that hankers for proof of the truly tragic, only death convinces us of sincerity: we are willing to find magic in an obituary while we deny it to a life. That logic is made explicit in Thomas Hardy's story, The Withered Arm, where a hangman's rope is sold in Dorchester the inch. Andrew Bihaly found writing therapeutic, and after what seems to have been a number of unsuccessful bouts with psychiatrists he began confiding his undated experiences to a journal, Which has just appeared, mysteriously edited (excisions are not marked) by Anthony Tuttle. Bihaly did this for two years. In the beginning he was working as a busboy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. restaurant. He was a broody, hardworking person, thinskinned, easy to meet, and possessing a generosity that amounted almost to martyrdom. In the process of describing the disappointments in his work, he remembers his past, and slowly on the balance sheet of this journal his memory scourges him: he recalls his childhood in Budapest; in a monastery, Visegrad, where he was placed by his mother (who was put into several concentration camps) only to be tormented by the ambiguous menace of the Nazis; he recalls the uprooted existence he led after the war, a succession of cities and camps, until his arrival in the United States in 1950 at the age of 9. He was educated in Philadelphia (one of his school essays is reprinted here with grotesque irony, What the Flag Means to Mé); he was in the Air Force; he went to Queens College for a while; he refers to a nervous breakdown, to plans for writing and photography. In its superficial details it is not an unusual story. But there is more. His birth certificate was forged to prove he was not a Jew; his father was killed in Eichmann's death march; his mother, for reasons he does not disclose, kept apart from him at crucial periods, and he had a crippling dependency on her. So, again and again, we read sentences like these: I am trying to be free of the vicious spasm of anxiety ... whenever I remember that I am Jewish, ... I look up at a woman and, no matter how young she is ... I feel she is my mother, she reminds me of my mother. Can a Jewish refugee become a healthy lover?, I need a doctor, Who am I? What am I doing? And there are fantasies: he dreams of having a harem, being craved by all the women he meets, being a writer, having expensive clothes, a fancy hífi set (The thing for me is to get my teeth fixed, get a nice set of fashionable winter clothes.), glamour, happiness, money. He feared anonymity and failure"--Taken from The New York Times Archives. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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This book made a stronger impression on me when I re-read it than when I first did long ago. I'm not sure why--there are no striking nor particularly thought-provoking passages in it, Bihaly himself seems unremarkable, and both the harrowing early life and the despair and the rare delights of his present one are only sketchily suggested. I suppose this time I'd a stronger sense of the times and surroundings and the man himself, the resourceful sometimes child-like gentle soul who could be explosively violent and who shifts between optimism and an implied hopelessness.
I was left very curious about several things. Was it forced labour, extreme bullying, or something else that was the childhood memory Bihaly's mind denied? how did he interact with his family? how exactly did his women, more than one of whom left him, and the bosses, more than one of them firing him, perceive Bihaly? I did find a bit more information by following up on the comment on an unexpected youtube clip, a song that adheres very closely to Bihaly's journal entries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzjv3ZwMCfE. Best seen after reading the book, I suspect.
In any case, this is a book to grab and give a close look if found on the shelves of a 2nd-hand bookshop.