I have been dipping into a selection of autobiographical writing, partly to survey the lay of the land in its contemporary provinces, but also to escape the contemporary by turning to books of an older generation and/or from different parts of the world: Dugmore Boetie’s
Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost, AS Mopeli-Paulus’s
The World and the Cattle, Günter Grass’s
Peeling the Onion, Marcel Pagnol’s
My Father’s Glory and
My Mother’s Castle. And then, Gregor von Rezzori’s
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite stands uncomfortably on the tightrope between the autobiographical and the novelistic, or the properly fictional (or, for that matter, the confabulatory, when one thinks of Boetie’s