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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Completely unreliable, 31 Dec 2004
Your perception of Clive James may be of him as a man who preceded Angus Deayton as the witty and erudite host of a range of travelogues and TV shows. If that is the extent of your knowledge of him, you're denying yourself a great pleasure. This is not to say that his is a life worth knowing about. It isn't even his own life that you are presented with in Always Unreliable. It is, at best, a close proximation of the life he wishes to live. James frequently alludes to a dislocated sense and of wishing he were freer to choose his own course within that which he had chosen. He's written about an idealised version of the path he took. These memoirs, though, are riddled with intelligence, eloquence, wit and a fine eye for the absurdities of the immigrant wanderer in a country which the displaced Australian finds strangely underdeveloped. There is a strong sense of hurt and broken dreams in this - never more so when James is moved to describe the dreadful flooding in his beloved Florence. He does, in fact, spend a considerable length of time mourning: for his treatment of his mother, for her loss of her husband and James' father, for the few women in his life. These volumes need time but you will frequently spot the turn of phrase for which James became famous. If your experience of reading these memoirs does not endear you to this singular man, you will surely grasp that here is one of the great Australian writers in rare form - self deprecation really suits him - and you will wish to read more of his startling, literary intellect.
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