He caught a blur: a left hand that had, on the bitter spring mornings on the steppes of Dorhitchen, during troubled whelpings, pulled calves from their mothers' wombs with a single tug, found Hugo's shirt collar. It yanked him forward and off the train.
This was excellent news, briefly, in that the first brick hurtling through the air missed Hugo. It thudded against the train cab stairs just as Hugo's entire field of vision filled with a permafrost of impenetrable white beard surrounding a pit of angry teeth that had known only Russian frontier dentists.
Or this passage. The book is about Charlie Chaplin having a breakdown over his next movie, his mother, his marriage, and some of the early studio problems in Hollywood. (It's about other things, too, but the Chaplin passages are so brilliant that it was almost a let down when the narration switched to Hugo or Lee.)
On every movie, his creative spirit followed this arc: absolute certainty, doubt, dread, horror, despair, new certainty (sending him into a new compass heading that was 45, 90, or even 270 degrees different from where his first certainty had sent him), and then the Sargasso. Then something saved him. Then he was home.
That is exactly what the creative process feels like to me.
I love books that are historical fiction; this takes place mostly during World War I. I love books about rivals; quite a lot of this book is about Chaplin and his "relationship" with Mary Pickford. I love stories about fucked up genius; Chaplin certainly qualifies. (The book does a lot to create a sympathetic view of his marriage to a teenager. Your mileage may vary.) I absolutely loved this book, even the sad parts, even the parts I didn't entirely think fit in with the rest of the story. There were a few parts where I felt the narrative started to get distracted and wander off, but the writing and the main plot more than made up for it for me. I love this book and his other book, Carter Beats the Devil, so much.
Grade: A
Originally posted 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment