- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Picador; New edition edition (14 July 1989)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330305808
- ISBN-13: 978-0330305808
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,006,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
In this latest collection of essays, Clive James tackles burning issues and shining personalities from Barry Humphries to Barry Manilow and Michael Jackson to Michael Foot. He discusses the nuances of Kung Fu cinema, the lyrical footwork of Torvill and Dean and the charms of the Statue of Liberty. Among Clive James' many books are "Unreliable Memoirs", "Falling Towards England" and two novels, "Brilliant Creatures" and "The Remake".
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The title of this collection of forty or so essays comes from the film The Third Man. A British officer tells an author of westerns he enjoys his books, especially for the odd information they contain. He didn't know, for instance, that there were snakecharmers in Texas. 'To please the officer,' writes James, 'a good man with more important work to do than to be a literary critic, was no bad thing.' It's a fitting title: the pieces essay an impressive variety of subjects in impressive depth. A few examples picked at random: an Australian poet called Les A. Murray, the Sydney Opera House, Literary magazines, snooker, the Queen in California, a spoof piece about Martin Amis by a writer called N.V. Rampant, Bob Geldof, Footlights, a magazine called Kung-Fu Monthly, a collection of bawdy poetry, Roland Barthes' book Camera Lucida, Michael Foot's election campaign . . .
Everything's game as long as it inspires real enthusiasm. But it isn't enthusiasm alone that leads to such entertaining writing. There's the Clive James voice, the purposeful gags, the artful structure and the behind-the-scenes learning, all of which will be familiar to you if you've read any other non-fiction book he's written. There's also an index, crazily missing from his TV criticism and latest essay collections.
Is it worth buying Snakecharmers in Texas if you already have Reliable Essays? It is: very few of these essays - four or five at most - are reprinted there. And the pieces in Snakecharmers in Texas, I think, hang together more entertainingly than those in the new books, perhaps because of the time period (1980-87), perhaps because the contents are more miscellaneous - they aren't selected with an eye on the future or to showcase the author, they're selected because that's what James found interesting at the time, so the book is more fun. (And I say that while still highly rating Reliable Essays.) An important effect of this electic style is that you keep finding you're interested in subjects you didn't know you were interested in.
I bought and read this book when I was in school. Even though I knew little about the various photographers, politicians, books or martial artists he mentioned, I enjoyed it and discovered enthusiasms I didn't know I had, including an enthusiasm for James' prose as a thing in itself. Thirteen years later, I'm still rereading it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Limited interest pieces (with a use-by)
5 Jun 2006
Format:Paperback
Having enjoyed some of James' TV work when I was a teenager in the 80s I thought I'd give this a go. James is articulate and has sense of humour, but there wasn't really enough here to make this worth the effort.
Several of the essays should really only have been published in journals for those with specialist interest - particularly those dealing exclusively with photographs we couldn't even see! Moreover - while James would deny it and point to his love of popular as well as elite culture - the first half of this collection is uncomfortably pretentious: it's important for Clive to show off his arcane knowledge with ubiquitous italicised Latin or French phrases, and constant high culture name dropping. Don't get me wrong - talking about Samuel Johnson if you're writing an essay about Shakespearian criticism is not pretentious; but throwing in Swift (et. al.) when you're writing about Bob Geldof is:
"...it can be said that the evocation of his Dublin childhood has a specifying force which reminds you that Swift, Joyce and Beckett came from the same city."
It reminds you of no such thing of course - it's purely to remind you that James is familiar with these impressive names, and that he knows they all came from Dublin.
Despite this sort of thing James is a competent writer and you can see why magazines and papers have employed him throughout the years. He also brought that usually enjoyable personal aspect to many of his reports, so you might, for example, get as many paragraphs about the difficulties he had finding a hotel as you do about the event he's ostensibly reporting on. However, again, the content of papers and magazines are almost inevitably dated - is there really any justification for including in a collection for posterity details like:
"Yesterday the sun shone bright. Piquet went straight out on one of his two permitted sets of qualifying tyres and notched up a time that only Prost could beat. Lauda went backwards with a sick engine. Then Piquet put on his other set of qualifying tyres and pipped Prost, taking his ninth pole for the season."
The interest in this paragraph was exhausted less than a day after it was published originally. Maybe, just maybe, up and coming journalists may want to look at some of these articles to get some tips on style for their own reporting, but there isn't anything here for the general reader.
I'm a general reader. If you are too, I'd advise you to leave this one on the shelf.
Several of the essays should really only have been published in journals for those with specialist interest - particularly those dealing exclusively with photographs we couldn't even see! Moreover - while James would deny it and point to his love of popular as well as elite culture - the first half of this collection is uncomfortably pretentious: it's important for Clive to show off his arcane knowledge with ubiquitous italicised Latin or French phrases, and constant high culture name dropping. Don't get me wrong - talking about Samuel Johnson if you're writing an essay about Shakespearian criticism is not pretentious; but throwing in Swift (et. al.) when you're writing about Bob Geldof is:
"...it can be said that the evocation of his Dublin childhood has a specifying force which reminds you that Swift, Joyce and Beckett came from the same city."
It reminds you of no such thing of course - it's purely to remind you that James is familiar with these impressive names, and that he knows they all came from Dublin.
Despite this sort of thing James is a competent writer and you can see why magazines and papers have employed him throughout the years. He also brought that usually enjoyable personal aspect to many of his reports, so you might, for example, get as many paragraphs about the difficulties he had finding a hotel as you do about the event he's ostensibly reporting on. However, again, the content of papers and magazines are almost inevitably dated - is there really any justification for including in a collection for posterity details like:
"Yesterday the sun shone bright. Piquet went straight out on one of his two permitted sets of qualifying tyres and notched up a time that only Prost could beat. Lauda went backwards with a sick engine. Then Piquet put on his other set of qualifying tyres and pipped Prost, taking his ninth pole for the season."
The interest in this paragraph was exhausted less than a day after it was published originally. Maybe, just maybe, up and coming journalists may want to look at some of these articles to get some tips on style for their own reporting, but there isn't anything here for the general reader.
I'm a general reader. If you are too, I'd advise you to leave this one on the shelf.
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