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A review by nwhyte
Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
4.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1418941.html
I don't know Alan Bennett's work all that well, but it doesn't really matter; these are memoirs of a shy English writer born in Leeds in the mid-1930s and looking back on his life from the years around the turn of the century. Bennett has become something of a national institution, though he would hate to be described as such, and writes here about why he turned down a knighthood in 1996 ('it didn't suit me').
The two most effective pieces in the book are the very long opening piece about his mother's mental illness and the rest of his extended family, particularly her sisters (one of whom died after wandering out of a mental hospital; Bennett himself found her body), and the rather shorter closing piece about his own, so far successful, battle with bowel cancer, a legacy of his father's side of the family. In between are long, amusing extracts from his diaries between 1996 and 2004, and various other pieces mostly about the arts in Britain and his own work which didn't appeal to me as much but are, as usual with Bennett, engaging and often bitterly funny. Recommended.
I don't know Alan Bennett's work all that well, but it doesn't really matter; these are memoirs of a shy English writer born in Leeds in the mid-1930s and looking back on his life from the years around the turn of the century. Bennett has become something of a national institution, though he would hate to be described as such, and writes here about why he turned down a knighthood in 1996 ('it didn't suit me').
The two most effective pieces in the book are the very long opening piece about his mother's mental illness and the rest of his extended family, particularly her sisters (one of whom died after wandering out of a mental hospital; Bennett himself found her body), and the rather shorter closing piece about his own, so far successful, battle with bowel cancer, a legacy of his father's side of the family. In between are long, amusing extracts from his diaries between 1996 and 2004, and various other pieces mostly about the arts in Britain and his own work which didn't appeal to me as much but are, as usual with Bennett, engaging and often bitterly funny. Recommended.