Simple Annals: A Memoir of Early Childhood - Couverture souple

Watkins, Roy

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1909585394 ISBN 13 : 9781909585393

Editeur : CB Editions, 2021

Synopsis

One morning in 1969 Roy Watkins woke up to find words on the sheet of paper he had left in his typewriter before going to sleep: ‘an incoherent jumble of apparently unconnected phrases about fire, explosions, soldiers, and railway lines’. The words recorded an actual event in Watkins’s life that took place just before his third birthday. Simple Annals is informed by these and other images and memories that surfaced over the following years: the sounds and songs, scrapes and surprises, of childhood in an ordinary but loving family in Lancashire in the 1940s and early 50s, brought to the page with an almost pre-verbal immediacy.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

‘The memoir of the world as seen by a child with its partialities and misapprehensions belongs to a distinguished tradition, from Great Expectations to Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist and Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child, and from What Maisie Knew to The Death of the Heart. But Watkins does something new and remarkable. He gives a more faithful representation of the child’s perceptions by often leaving its confusions unresolved … This short memoir is an absorbing masterpiece which sustains over its 127 pages the lyric intensity of the great practitioners of the short story.’ – Bernard O’Donoghue, Literary Review

‘The past is also a banana skin. The temptation to rationalise and explain, to do a little Freudian voice-leading, can be almost overwhelming. Miraculously, Watkins avoids that altogether, ending his memoir in his eleventh year so as to avoid any attempt to give artificial coherence or psychological significance to his memories. They are simply delivered … It’s an astonishing achievement.’ – Brian Morton, Times Literary Supplement

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: CB Editions
• Date d'édition: 2021
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1909585394
• ISBN 13: 9781909585393
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 136
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible