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Flickerbook
Unusual for an autobiography, Flickerbook is a re-living rather than a remembering. The distinguished children's author and writer on children and education, Leila Berg, re-experiences her early Jewish childhood and adolescence during the twenties and thirties up until the day when the first air-raid siren sounded.
Nourished in her battle to make sense of the world by the riches of Manchester - the theatre, the bookstalls, the music, the cinema, a joyful love of the surrounding countryside - she grows into a fiercely independent young woman, and joins the anti-fascists, then the Young Communists. Refusing to go to university, appalled by her brief experience of teacher training college, she falls in love; but both her lovers are killed, fighting in Spain in the International Brigade.
Leila Berg introduces us to a sad, funny and passionate child who we see grow through the years. Flickerbook is an extraordinarily honest and moving work of autobiography which will change the way we think about children and childhood forever.
Nourished in her battle to make sense of the world by the riches of Manchester - the theatre, the bookstalls, the music, the cinema, a joyful love of the surrounding countryside - she grows into a fiercely independent young woman, and joins the anti-fascists, then the Young Communists. Refusing to go to university, appalled by her brief experience of teacher training college, she falls in love; but both her lovers are killed, fighting in Spain in the International Brigade.
Leila Berg introduces us to a sad, funny and passionate child who we see grow through the years. Flickerbook is an extraordinarily honest and moving work of autobiography which will change the way we think about children and childhood forever.
- GenresNonfiction
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 16, 2024
Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Manchester. Shards of light through rain. Fragmentary thoughts of a girl growing up in a puzzling world of convention and separateness. A guileless encounter with all that growing up entails. Fresh and honest, this is a flickerbook of thoughts - isn’t that how we actually think? Rather wonderful.
July 31, 2013
I enjoyed the fragmentary style of this autobiography - in some ways it was like a collection of flash memoirs. It worked especially well in the earlier sections conveying the disjointed - and intense - nature of childhood memory.
Leila Berg is brilliantly accurate. Disturbingly so, when it comes to evoking the sensuality of childhood experience, the way in a young person registers both pleasure and pain.
The brutality of teachers, parents and other children is recorded unflinchingly.
I found the style a bit less satisfactory in the sections dealing with the author's adolescence and her early adulthood. On the one hand I liked enjoyed reading about the political struggles of the Left in the 1930s as seen through female - rather than the usual male - eyes. And there are some vivid passages which convey the thrills and dangers of sex.
Ultimately I found the book disturbing. There is something scarily dissociated in the portrayal of a girl who was neglected and emotionally abused, before suddenly being courted - both by her father and by other men.
I was left hungering for some kind of postscript. Although perhaps that's a tribute to the power of this memoir.
Leila Berg is brilliantly accurate. Disturbingly so, when it comes to evoking the sensuality of childhood experience, the way in a young person registers both pleasure and pain.
The brutality of teachers, parents and other children is recorded unflinchingly.
I found the style a bit less satisfactory in the sections dealing with the author's adolescence and her early adulthood. On the one hand I liked enjoyed reading about the political struggles of the Left in the 1930s as seen through female - rather than the usual male - eyes. And there are some vivid passages which convey the thrills and dangers of sex.
Ultimately I found the book disturbing. There is something scarily dissociated in the portrayal of a girl who was neglected and emotionally abused, before suddenly being courted - both by her father and by other men.
I was left hungering for some kind of postscript. Although perhaps that's a tribute to the power of this memoir.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews