Not Entitled: A Memoir - Softcover

Kermode, Frank

3.74

35 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006863299 ISBN 13: 9780006863298

Publisher: Flamingo, 1997

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Kermode was born and brought up on the Isle of Man. He became one of Britain's most famous literary critics, but in this biography he chooses to focus on the scenes, values and legacies of his public and private life.

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Review:

"An oddly beautiful, or beautifully odd, book--a witty and rueful exercise in self-deprecation.. . . "Not Entitled "remarkably conveys the 'microclimate' of depression at the heart of a clever diffidence while being steadily entertaining, and even poetical." --John Updike, "The New Yorker"

"A triumph of tone... Kermode has written mainly of the gentle shocks and surprises that compose the part of a life that we choose. He has remembered safely and remembered well." --David Bromwich, "The New York Times Book Review"

An oddly beautiful, or beautifully odd, book--a witty and rueful exercise in self-deprecation.. . . "Not Entitled "remarkably conveys the 'microclimate' of depression at the heart of a clever diffidence while being steadily entertaining, and even poetical. "John Updike, The New Yorker"

A triumph of tone... Kermode has written mainly of the gentle shocks and surprises that compose the part of a life that we choose. He has remembered safely and remembered well. "David Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review""

"An oddly beautiful, or beautifully odd, book--a witty and rueful exercise in self-deprecation.. . . Not Entitled remarkably conveys the 'microclimate' of depression at the heart of a clever diffidence while being steadily entertaining, and even poetical." --John Updike, The New Yorker

"A triumph of tone... Kermode has written mainly of the gentle shocks and surprises that compose the part of a life that we choose. He has remembered safely and remembered well." --David Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review

From the Back Cover:

“Kermode's memoir, 'Not Entitled', is an oddly beautiful, or a beautifully odd book... it is as an inadequate son, faulty pupil, indifferent Navy man, bad interviewee, and dupe of more worldly others that he principally figures in his own accounts... The uneasy sensation of a fundamental exclusion... has haunted him but surely this sensation is a common human one? No amount of positive accomplishment and social cheer can cancel it, and it is Kermode's significant accomplishment, in the insouciance of old age, to have given it so delicate and circumstantial an expression.”
JOHN UPDIKE, 'New Yorker'

“What makes 'Not Entitled' so magical is its combination of painful honesty with exquisite prose and crystalline wit... What emerges is an insider who always felt an outsider; a famous scholar who was yet too solitary to make marriage work... His genius is to offer such to make marriage work... His genius is to offer such characteristics as personal failings while conveying them in terms which make us see that they are common human ones – that they belong to ourselves.”
JACK WULLSCHLAGER, 'Financial Times'

“In my opinion, and that of many others, Frank Kermode is the finest English critic of his generation... His memoir has all the virtues of his criticism – lucidity, wit, intelligence, economy, with an additional dimension of personal introspection. He speaks, with characteristic shrewdness, of 'the good writing that cannot help eliminating truth from autobiography', citing Nabokov as an example. But he seems to me to have come as near as possible to closing that circle. 'Not Entitled' is both convincingly honest and an unqualified pleasure to read. I only wish it were longer.”
DAVID LODGE, 'New York Review of Books'

“The writing is wonderful throughout: oblique, stealthy, lucid, finely tuned to every little ripple of multiple meaning... Kermode is a writer and a very good one.”
MICHAEL WOOD, 'London Review of Books'

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