My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world. The lie in.
Table of contents
- Frequently bought together
- Review: A Lie About My Father by John Burnside | Books | The Guardian
- A Lie About My Father
- What He Could Bear
But Corby wasn't Canada, and when young John saw the light die in his mother's eyes, as his father extinguished her hopes of domestic harmony and a decent home, something hardened in his own heart too. There was plenty else to resent, such as his father saying that he wished he, John, could have been the one to die in infancy, not his older sister. A younger brother died soon after birth, too, and Burnside was so conscious of his ghostly absence that he asked his mother "Why don't I have a twin?
But the damage had been done much further back, not so much through his father's casual cruelty a favourite teddy thrown on the fire to teach a lesson about not leaving toys lying around as through his withholding of paternal approval. Walk the Line, the current film about Johnny Cash, tells a similar story. Given that the son was - to begin with - a polite, precocious, straight-A schoolboy, there was plenty the father might have been proud of.
- The long discipline of happiness;
- Sketches for the Pedal Piano, No. 4 in D-flat Major.
- Silent Voice?
But as he half-grasped even at the time, his father was typical of a whole generation of working-class men for whom "cruelty was an ideology. He wanted to kill off my finer - and so, weaker - self. Burnside treats his own son very differently. But, looking back, he accepts that he was partly to blame: In the early years in Cowdenbeath, he found refuge from boredom and upset in the woods behind his house - a pit-town boy like Ted Hughes exulting in nature.
Later, he lost himself in more adult versions of the wild - binge-drinking, sex, hallucinogenic drugs, week-long parties. He first took LSD, he says, with a sense of sacrament as a Catholic, he knew the sensation of a wafer on the tongue and because the adult world seemed to be a web of untruths. But there was no escaping his father. Even the sado-masochistic relationship with one of his lovers repeated a pattern laid down in the childhood home. In the second half of the book, we watch father and son following parallel trajectories, both of them in freefall, the older man, now widowed, retreating into himself, the younger ending up in a psychiatric hospital.
It takes time for Burnside to achieve the sea-change he aspires to, and to embark on the "long discipline of happiness". That he gets there is due in part to him allowing his father some credit and in accepting that they have more in common than he used to think: I cannot talk about him without talking about myself, just as I can never look at myself in the mirror without seeing his face.
That's why the preface urges us to treat this "as a work of fiction", because it's partial, subjective and - no matter how scrupulous with facts - a story. Finally, however, and with some misgivings, I abandoned that idea and, as Mike wanted me to do, not just because his head was full of beautiful, simple scripts, but also because he was a certain kind of son, and because Martin was a certain kind of man, I told him a lie about my father. What Burnside does next is unexpected. Nobody reminisced with him about the old days. To do so would have required a strength of character that was, perhaps inevitably, beyond him.
Nonetheless, Burnside is kind to his father at this stage. Every time I see a wedding, I wonder what the bride and groom expect from it all, and why none of the others there, the old ones, the long-married, do not step up and warn them about the enterprise. The reader expecting vivid tales of violence and sexual abuse will thankfully be disappointed.
He wanted to kill off my finer — and so, weaker — self. Signs of weakness, all.
Frequently bought together
Ultimately, Burnside in his teens turned to LSD and other drugs, deciding not to fit in to a society that offered him nothing. A Lie About My Father is like a closely argued essay, where the narrative moves unnoticeably from one subject to the next. It could be mistaken for one of those books which consists of one long sentence; or one long exhalation. He spends pages analysing and explaining his father.
Review: A Lie About My Father by John Burnside | Books | The Guardian
I cannot talk about him without talking about myself, just as I can never look at myself in the mirror without seeing his face. Every life is a more or less secret narrative, but when a man becomes a father, the story is lived, not for, but in the constant awareness of another, or others. It sounds very intriguing and the examples suggest as much, and yet…Burnside is a strange one. I must try again. Well, you certainly interested me enough to look for its availability here in the U. A top notch review as always, Sir.
I struggle rather to see why I should care about his family. We think of the poet and novelist as a literary figure by definition , capable and in control, but this book shows just how much mess and misery went to make the artist, and how those elements are essential to his work.
A Lie About My Father
He also has a new novel out this summer, which I can guarantee Will will be reviewing long before I do. So this has told me all I need to know about this book and my thanks for that. First off — thanks for such a great blog that has consistently provided me with reliable cues on what books to look out for.
His writing hit my life like a meteor in late He puts so much of his life experience into his fiction and after reading his memoir you recognise so much of it in his novels that every incident, every observation takes on added meaning. I personally really like The Locust Room though has there ever been a novel published with less dialogue in it?
This memoir though contains some exquisite passages, and they often come out of nowhere to completely jolt the reader into a moment of revelation. The shadows, the trees, the wide lawns — it was all as it should be, but it was too still, too heavy, waiting for the day when the dead would return, coming through rain, coming through the wind, seeking out the angles and corners they knew, the faces they could name, the bodies that were flesh of their flesh.
I recommend his fiction and his poetry to anyone who cares about language. Thanks for your comment, Rik, and your kind words. I do have Glister so I will make that my next one. About three decades ago, I wrote a weekly book column for the Calgary Herald — the nature of the beast meant that more than half the time that involved interviewing an author on a promotional tour.
Some interviews were wonderful Margaret Atwood extended 30 minutes into two hours and my pen was put away after the first 15 minutes — the book was Surfacing if anyone cares , some were okay, most were terrible. From that experience, I decided that I would prefer to appreciate works on their own — once they were published, much like a work of art, they stood as something independent.
Nice people write quite dreadful novels, not nice people write some wonderful ones. So I also avoid memoirs. I acknowledge that that makes me an incomplete reader in many respects which is why I read blogs and reviews of memoirs. In conclusion, I find that restricting myself to the fictional output is rewarding.
What He Could Bear
If all of that reads like a totally inadequate apologia, I could not dispute the conclusion. Consider it a pecadillo if you must. Sufficient talent justifies any form, which seems to be the case here. A novel should not require knowledge of the author to persuade.
- A Lie About My Father: A Memoir.
- Geflüsterte Worte (German Edition)?
- A Lie About My Father: leondumoulin.nl: John Burnside: Books.
- .
As a genre memoirs are in most cases essentially a form of self-aggrandising gossip. Sufficient quality overrides pretty much anything else as I started this comment saying. The interconnection of lives and books is, to me, dizzying and not distracting. Also Kurt Vonnegut makes the following point in his last novel which, appropriately for our discussion, was as much non-fiction as fiction Timequake:.
If you really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, art or not, you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what happens. People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking to you.
Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes? There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch.