Book 9 of 2019: All Tomorrow’s Parties by Rob Spillman
This was very good. It’s a memoir that alternates between the author’s childhood, growing up in Cold War Berlin with his father, who’s a musician totally dedicated to his art, and his young adulthood, living with his wife in New York, Portugal, and finally East Berlin just before reunification. All the way he’s chasing what he believes his father has always had--a life dedicated to art and lived at the center of everything. But he’s also trying to outrun this feeling that there’s nothing at his own center, that he has nothing to say. It’s all very much like this gorgeous T.H. White quote from The Once and Future King:
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned... There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads. Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls, what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
I recommend this one to anyone who’s ever been a young idiot trying to live an Important life without really knowing what that means.
What to read next: Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, for another memoir that looks at the meaning of life, but from a very different angle.
