Father and Son: A Memoir
Jonathan Raban
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Father and Son: A Memoir
Jonathan Raban
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
A book I would have tracked down even if this weren’t my job.
The chapters on his parents are so distant from that in time, culture and feeling that the whole seems disjointed and pointless.
As full of eloquence as it is free of sentimentality, the memoir is a parting gift from a figure of insight and fierce independence..
Offers a final reckoning (Raban died in January this year), less egotistical, more rueful, informed by a catastrophic sense of the damage that can come one’s way. Raban is far too good a writer to make the parallel blunt, but the stroke is his war, and from the perspective of a wheelchair-bound hemiplegic he sees his father differently.
A quixotic and nomadic seafaring writer, Raban was fascinated by the lives of the people he met.
The book’s first line makes an impressive jolt.
Everything that’s matchless about Raban’s work — his hyperacute eye for detail, his powers of synthesis, his mordant sense of humor, his vast reservoirs of knowledge and his love of travel — is there.
As it is, it rambles and I think Raban would have binned some of the more egregious digressions.
By drawing on his parents’ diaries and letters, and historical research, Raban pieces together their wartime experiences and tries to understand them with more empathy than anywhere else in his oeuvre.
It’s a highly personal account of two very different experiences of trauma, loss of agency and adjustment. Throughout, Raban is brutally honest.
...the chapters concerning Peter Raban (in his mid-20s) and the letters he exchanged with his new wife, Monica...are written with the mastery one expects of... [Raban]: his impeccable historical scholarship, his erudition of all things nautical and geographical, and, most importantly, his command of the language. The sections concerning his stroke and time in the hospital...are unusually conversational. Indeed, while reading these chapters, I could see his ghost talking to me from across the dinner table on the third floor of his Queen Anne home..
In this memoir, Raban has produced an excellent personal account of his father’s wartime experiences as he relayed them to his wife as much as he was allowed, backed by a good historical narrative to augment those experiences. However, there is a missed opportunity for the son to show how those experiences impacted his life, especially as he was undergoing his own recovery from a serious life-threatening ordeal..
Raban illuminates the unpredictability of our memories. Frequently we invite them. Occasionally they just pop up. Sometimes we are helpless to suppress them..
A touching farewell from a careful, thoughtful observer of life..
Exceptional.