- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Short Books Ltd (1 April 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1907595007
- ISBN-13: 978-1907595004
- Product Dimensions: 18.4 x 12.8 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 238,790 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Seasonal Suicide Notes: My life as it is lived
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Product Description
Review
The most brilliantly funny and genuinely
thought-provoking book of the year --Sunday Times
These sulphurous annual round robins are not just
cry-makingly funny and profane... there are also arresting
insights into art, literature and life and flashes of
beautiful seriousness. The comedy is exquisitely
well observed. --The Telegraph
If they ever award medals for comic genius Lewis will be
a shoo-in for gold... Hilarious. -- The Mail on Sunday
Roger Lewis is a genius writer, and he knows it. --Lynn Barber
This is one of the strangest books you will ever read. It is also the funniest. And the most reckless ... If you like black comedy, and bad taste, you will find yourself in
Narnia here...
--The Spectator
thought-provoking book of the year --Sunday Times
These sulphurous annual round robins are not just
cry-makingly funny and profane... there are also arresting
insights into art, literature and life and flashes of
beautiful seriousness. The comedy is exquisitely
well observed. --The Telegraph
If they ever award medals for comic genius Lewis will be
a shoo-in for gold... Hilarious. -- The Mail on Sunday
Roger Lewis is a genius writer, and he knows it. --Lynn Barber
This is one of the strangest books you will ever read. It is also the funniest. And the most reckless ... If you like black comedy, and bad taste, you will find yourself in
Narnia here...
--The Spectator
Product Description
For some years, the biographer Roger Lewis has been entertaining his friends with an annual letter, in which he records details of the joys and frustrations of his life as it is actually lived. Updated with a new section for spring, this 'cult classic', a hilarious collection of diaries and memoirs - highlights of which include a trip up the Amazon River with countless ants and Maureen Lipman; his eldest son Tristan training to be a juggler at Zippos Circus ("Frankly, where did Magdalen College, Oxford, ever get me, eh?"); the mystery of the stolen kettle at Age Concern; the humiliation of not being invited to the premiere of his very own movie at Cannes; and the way the Dell call-centre people in Bombay keep thinking he's a woman...With his sharp eye for folly, his malice - and the unexpected shafts of humanity in spite of his chronic ill temper - Roger Lewis is the Evelyn Waugh of the 21st century. These addictive and paradoxically life-enhancing Seasonal Suicide Notes have the makings of a lasting comic masterpiece.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 48 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I don't blame the publisher for trying to maximise sales by having the standard, insipid Christmas humour title dustjacket, but it doesn't do justice to the book. This is one of the funniest and most incisive books I've read for years and I hate Roger Lewis for being far wittier than I could ever hope to be. At least I'm slimmer (just) and less Welsh ( a lot).
This book will probably appear on gift tables (or even worse, "gifting", which sounds a little rude) in bookshops, but this wonderful, liberating, vitriolic rant is far too good to waste on others. Buy it for yourself.
This book will probably appear on gift tables (or even worse, "gifting", which sounds a little rude) in bookshops, but this wonderful, liberating, vitriolic rant is far too good to waste on others. Buy it for yourself.
29 of 36 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I asked for this book in the Picadilly branch of Waterstones, 'That's by Lewis Roger' said the pretty sales assistant. An apposite anecdote given the bile contained within this book. Lewis Roger is a grub street journalist trying to make a living when grub street has collapsed and instead of living in London schmoozing with literary types he is washed up in the 'Herefordshire Balkans'.
This short book is a seriously funny account of his life, his complaints, and his erstwhile desire for recognition. Following a much misunderstood, much maligned biography of Anthony Burgess (10 copies sold in the last year of counting), Lewis bewails just about every successful recent British writer/celeb. Delightfully in various ways, he lays into Clive James - a writer of 'mouldy fudge', Andrew Roberts (a baboon), Ned Sherrin, Simon Cowell, Julian Barnes (and his late wife Pat Kavanagh), Jeremy Clarkson, 'sad mother' Julie Myerson and best of all, Harold Pinter (obit) 'what a dreadful clanking beast he was'. Heaven knows how he got this past the libel lawyers. I for one am delighted he did.
Interspersed with this literary bile are delightful snippets of his life as a marooned intellectual in the provinces. He cuts out articles from the local paper and offers snippets of local life: 'Age Concern has introduced a Toe Nail Cutting Scheme in the Community Centre run by "our trained volunteers", and tells filthy jokes picked up from Barry Cryer.
Also in these diaries are laments at his health (he is fat and has fat person's ailments), his kids, his class (he was a butcher's son and feels the London establishment looks down on him accordingly), his lack of money, his envy at other people's money (such as Gyles Brandreth and the late Alan Coren) and his continual snubbing by his publisher's literary parties (which he doesn't want to attend anyway).
Frustrated at being born in a time when the commercial imperative is everything in publishing (true, I used to work as one), and the weak collapse of the educated elites as they pump out more Jordan and Jamie Oliver, Lewis fancies himself as a contemporary, neglected version of his hero Anthony Burgess: a man of voracious intellectual appetites, though sadly without anyone to appreciate it. In the end, Suicide Notes is more like a contemporary Diary of a Nobody (extracted from in the epigram).
Some people predict this book to become a cult classic and I certainly hope it does, as this book is one of the funniest I have read. I think Lewis is due a break, just so pretty Waterstone's assistants will know his name. I think he would like that.
This short book is a seriously funny account of his life, his complaints, and his erstwhile desire for recognition. Following a much misunderstood, much maligned biography of Anthony Burgess (10 copies sold in the last year of counting), Lewis bewails just about every successful recent British writer/celeb. Delightfully in various ways, he lays into Clive James - a writer of 'mouldy fudge', Andrew Roberts (a baboon), Ned Sherrin, Simon Cowell, Julian Barnes (and his late wife Pat Kavanagh), Jeremy Clarkson, 'sad mother' Julie Myerson and best of all, Harold Pinter (obit) 'what a dreadful clanking beast he was'. Heaven knows how he got this past the libel lawyers. I for one am delighted he did.
Interspersed with this literary bile are delightful snippets of his life as a marooned intellectual in the provinces. He cuts out articles from the local paper and offers snippets of local life: 'Age Concern has introduced a Toe Nail Cutting Scheme in the Community Centre run by "our trained volunteers", and tells filthy jokes picked up from Barry Cryer.
Also in these diaries are laments at his health (he is fat and has fat person's ailments), his kids, his class (he was a butcher's son and feels the London establishment looks down on him accordingly), his lack of money, his envy at other people's money (such as Gyles Brandreth and the late Alan Coren) and his continual snubbing by his publisher's literary parties (which he doesn't want to attend anyway).
Frustrated at being born in a time when the commercial imperative is everything in publishing (true, I used to work as one), and the weak collapse of the educated elites as they pump out more Jordan and Jamie Oliver, Lewis fancies himself as a contemporary, neglected version of his hero Anthony Burgess: a man of voracious intellectual appetites, though sadly without anyone to appreciate it. In the end, Suicide Notes is more like a contemporary Diary of a Nobody (extracted from in the epigram).
Some people predict this book to become a cult classic and I certainly hope it does, as this book is one of the funniest I have read. I think Lewis is due a break, just so pretty Waterstone's assistants will know his name. I think he would like that.
26 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Roger Lewis makes a great deal of his lowly upbringing - butcher's boy, Wales etc. What he doesn't tell the reader, and which you may not have known, is that his great uncle was the famous novelist, painter and polemicist, Wyndham Lewis. A beautiful, if ferocious, prose style, a keen eye for suitably odious targets and a dark sense of humour - all talents the great Wyndham had, which, sadly, are lacking in his dipstick of a nephew.
Rog doesn't live in Fulham. Ok? Got that? Sure? Good. Rog wants to come on like a rebel, an outsider, but he went to Oxford, he spends half his year in Austria, his book on Peter Sellers was made into a feature film and he is matey with 'loyal comrades-in-arms' Lynn Barber, Sam Leith, Francis Wheen, Gyles Brandreth amongst bag loads of other well-known, well-paid, establishment journos and writers. What exactly is the difference between someone who boasts of being a member of the Garrick and someone who boasts he is the 'only person to refuse an offer of membership of the Garrick?' Both are conceited bores.
'Seasonal Suicide Notes' is a well-presented little book with a nice Christmassy cover and it fits neatly into a Christmas stocking. Respect to the publishers who have done a good marketing job on it. The contents though are mediocre. Roger admires fine writing, but continues to fail to be able to produce it. This book is marginally better written than his biography of Burgess, having, as it does, a subject much closer to the writer's heart. At least, on this occasion, the scattershot spleen and monotonous, whiney tone only dirty the reader's feelings towards Lewis and not to somebody they might actually care about.
If you are looking for a great book about those left behind by life, try Lewis's Austrian compatriot, Thomas Bernhard. His novel 'The Loser' is as fine a book as I have read. Or if you like a narrative brimming with snotty cynicism how about 'Snooty Baronet' by Roger's uncle? Wyndham also has the humour, humanity and classy prose style that eludes his untalented nephew.
This is not to say that 'Seasonal Suicide Notes' is 'hateful' or 'unreadable' as some critics have suggested. It is far too bland for that. It is basically a book that might be enjoyed by those readers of the Spectator that particularly delight in the columns of Taki and Charles Moore, appreciative of the work of comfortably off, socially-established, middle-aged men, who write in a mean-minded way about any trivial subject that happens to have annoyed them that day.
Rog doesn't live in Fulham. Ok? Got that? Sure? Good. Rog wants to come on like a rebel, an outsider, but he went to Oxford, he spends half his year in Austria, his book on Peter Sellers was made into a feature film and he is matey with 'loyal comrades-in-arms' Lynn Barber, Sam Leith, Francis Wheen, Gyles Brandreth amongst bag loads of other well-known, well-paid, establishment journos and writers. What exactly is the difference between someone who boasts of being a member of the Garrick and someone who boasts he is the 'only person to refuse an offer of membership of the Garrick?' Both are conceited bores.
'Seasonal Suicide Notes' is a well-presented little book with a nice Christmassy cover and it fits neatly into a Christmas stocking. Respect to the publishers who have done a good marketing job on it. The contents though are mediocre. Roger admires fine writing, but continues to fail to be able to produce it. This book is marginally better written than his biography of Burgess, having, as it does, a subject much closer to the writer's heart. At least, on this occasion, the scattershot spleen and monotonous, whiney tone only dirty the reader's feelings towards Lewis and not to somebody they might actually care about.
If you are looking for a great book about those left behind by life, try Lewis's Austrian compatriot, Thomas Bernhard. His novel 'The Loser' is as fine a book as I have read. Or if you like a narrative brimming with snotty cynicism how about 'Snooty Baronet' by Roger's uncle? Wyndham also has the humour, humanity and classy prose style that eludes his untalented nephew.
This is not to say that 'Seasonal Suicide Notes' is 'hateful' or 'unreadable' as some critics have suggested. It is far too bland for that. It is basically a book that might be enjoyed by those readers of the Spectator that particularly delight in the columns of Taki and Charles Moore, appreciative of the work of comfortably off, socially-established, middle-aged men, who write in a mean-minded way about any trivial subject that happens to have annoyed them that day.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Laugh out loud
Having read in the D Mail today, 2nd Jan 2012, (not my paper, found on train, honest guv) that Roger Lewis is in Hospital, I went online to see how he was doing, ending up looking... Read more
Published 4 months ago by sideshowsu
Stupendous
Quite the funniest book I have ever read. Lewis's observations on life, not least the self-deprecating ones, are paralysingly hilarious. Read more
Published 7 months ago by S. Nickerson
The antidote to round robins.
I suffer each year from a couple who think I am interested in the state of hubbie's rectum, their pensions, and did we notice the archbishop who died was someone they knew 40 years... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Miss C. Soutar
The tone seemed a bit bitter
I agree with the other 1 star review, the tone just seemed bitter and whiney. I did not finish the book, so cannot comment fully.
Published 9 months ago by J. Davies
a classic
This really made me laugh out loud a few times, and kept me hugely amused throughout. It's absurdly self-obsessed at times, ridiculously unfair to a few others, startlingly rude... Read more
Published 20 months ago by eringobragh
So good I read it in a day.
A fine book which will have you laughing out loud. Over the years I've been returning to the author's biography of Peter Sellers due to its singularly original and perceptive... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Christian Rakovsky
Almost illegally funny
This book was confiscated on a recent holiday by my nine year old daughter. 'Laughing out loud like that about a book will make people think you are mad. Read more
Published 22 months ago by myfanwy
Upper-middle-class bellyaching
I got this thinking it would be like David Sedaris' brilliant "Santaland Diaries" and would be a good read for the airport/plane on holiday this year - well all I can say is thank... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Sam Quixote
Outstanding!
One of the funniest & most honest books I have read in ages.
A "grumpy old man" rant perhaps....but bloody funny. Read more
A "grumpy old man" rant perhaps....but bloody funny. Read more
Published 24 months ago by P. A. Tonkin
A different kind of humor
I bought this book based on the description, especially because of the quoted reviews and I expected it to be an extremely funny book. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Christoph Schroth
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