The Man Within My Head

The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

5.00 out of 5 (1 ratings)

Format:
Hardback 
Pages:
256 
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 
Publication Date:
10 May 2012 
Category:
Autobiography: General 
ISBN:
9781408828755 

Description

We all carry other people inside our heads - actors, leaders, writers, people from history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know. In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the writer Graham Greene: he examines Greene's obsessions, his life on the road, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene's trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all they have in common: a typical old-school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, however, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself. Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka at war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past, commuting between the cloisters of a fifteenth-century boarding school and California in the 1960s, one of our most resourceful cultural explorers gives us his most personal and revelatory book yet, and one of the best new portraits of Greene himself.

Showing 1-1 out of 1 reviews.

  • Pico Iyer's writing soothes me. The fluidity, the depth of his sentences are among the best constructed I've ever encountered. And, of course, I share his passion for travel, for depth, for seeking answers to the larger questions. But in this exploration of the profound effect Graham Greene has had on him--he is nominally The Man, after all but as Iyer's wife points out, it could also be his father--I found, subconsciously expectedly while consciously unexpectedly, most moving his passages about the fathers we all seek:"A son may choose never to listen to a father, but a father...is always bound to a son, and real disinheritance is hard."

    5.00 out of 5

    JerryColonna

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