Father Figure

by Beverley Nichols

Book Overview

Book by Beverly nichols This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671213709
• ISBN13: 9780671213701
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

False Father Figure

I have given this work a five-star rating because this work reads beautifully from beginning to end. It, however, really only deserves a four-stating rating, as will be explained below. One feels totally absorbed in the life of the author as a young boy and young man first frightened and afterward angered by his father's odd and drunken behavior. There is a touch of Proust in the early pages, in particular, about his boyhood and this father. One feels completely captured by the near-Gothic circumstances in which the author finds himself as an adolescent and a grown man as well regarding this scary, scarring, intimidating, homophobic, constantly drunken figure and his constantly victimized, sacrificing mother. The writing and the depictions drawn are superbly psychologically and aesthetically balanced, neither overdramatic and one-sided nor clinical and overly detached. One thinks of how much must have had the author to overcome and reach a summit of maturity where such deep memories and traumas might be tranquilly and elegantly related without the stain of vindictiveness or the threat of endless blame clinging to its pages. However, if one reads the biography of Beverley Nichols by Bryan Connon, the reader will learn that many of the facts and scenes dramatized in this so-called memoir neither true nor real. For one, Beverley Nichols' father had a great deal more respect for his son than is shown in this niggardly, semi-truthful story regarding him. How ubiquitous and yet how disappointing it is to be duped (once more) by another memoir that is fictionalized beyond integrity or trust for the reader. It is a golden and rounded work of art that manages to stain the page-turning finger of its readers with a green ring. I'd like to think that the author stretched the truth in order to capture the inner truth or inner light, but this is supposed to be a memoir, not poetry.