Myths and Memories (Flamingo) by Gilbert Adair

by Gilbert Adair

Cover has light reader wear, crease on the back. Pages are lightly tanned, but otherwise very clean and unmarked. Ships fast from California.

Hardcover

First published August 11, 1986

About the author

Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic and journalist. Born in Edinburgh, he lived in Paris from 1968 through 1980. He is most famous for such novels as Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003), both of which were made into films, although he is also noted as the translator of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used. Adair won the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for this work.

In 1998 and 1999 Adair was the chief film critic for The Independent on Sunday, where in 1999 he also wrote a year-long column called "The Guillotine." In addition to the films made from his own works, Adair worked on the screenplays for a number of Raúl Ruiz films. Although he rarely spoke of his sexual orientation in public, not wishing to be labelled, he acknowledge in an interview that there were many gay themes in his work. He died from a brain hemorrhage in 2011.

(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 1980s, a promising English critic sought to dabble in a little French theory, bravely flying in the face of the frog-dissing Anglo lit establishment, for whom Barthes was something one took with bubbles. His name was Gilbert Adair, the handsome and bespectacled film critic and first-rate pasticheur, and his book was Myths & Memories—a riff on Barthes’s Mythologies, an attempt to dissect the ‘myths’ of popular culture in a similar analytic way, the result being a style that is not Adair’s warm intellectual standard in his subsequent column collections, but a more rigorous and scholarly probing into (now-dated) British hot tatties like fish and chips, tabloids, Wimbledon, Tom Stoppard’s intellectualising of anti-intellectualism, and the poetry of Craig Raine. To say this is for Adair completists only would not be inaccurate, although any lucky fellow(ete) chancing upon this svelte number in a used bookstore would do well to part with their 99 pence or cents. Also included is Adair’s take on Perec’s Je me souviens (I Remember), 400 nostalgic era-defining memory blips now as common to the culture as nostalgising about nostalgia programmes. This was Adair’s first Oulipian piece, before leap(frog)ing into the stratosphere with his translation of Perec’s A Void eight years later. (Praised by Lords Bradbury and Burgess too).