Product Description

'A gigantic book on a gigantic theme' Sunday Times

'Aphoristic and acutely provocative: a crash course in civilization' J. M. Coetzee

A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write. Organized from A through to Z, and containing over 100 essays, it's the ultimate guide to the twentieth-century, illuminating the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers. From Louis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, it's a book for our times – and, indeed, for all time.

'Clive James is one of the most ingeniously stimulating literary critics now writing in English. Cultural Amnesia, with its encyclopedic length and organization and the intense jostle of its ideas, is to be dipped into over weeks and months. If the dipper occasionally brings up exasperation, it brings up astonished delight far more often; and, best of all, exasperated astonished delight' Boston Globe

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5628 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 896 pages

Sunday Times
'Witty, insightful and unashamedly erudite, the book is a superb miscellany of 20th-century cultural and political subjects.'

Daily Telegraph
'Clive James alphabetical tour of his lifetime's reading and thinking is startling in its breadth'

Sunday Herald
'Discerning and comprehensive'

Customer Reviews

Do not be daunted by this book

This is an amazing book, unlike anything else I’ve ever come across. Don’t be put off by its sheer size, by its odd title, by the unfamiliarity of many of the names in its alphabetical list of subjects (writers, film stars, musicians, politicians, you name it), or by the fact that it looks at first glance like a work of reference. A better title would perhaps have been “Reliable Memoirs”, because what it’s really doing is filling in the gaps in Clive James’s sequence of “Unreliable Memoirs”.

It consists of a hundred or more brief articles based on quotes noted down during a lifetime’s extensive reading, any one of which is liable at any point to go off at a tangent on a hugely entertaining digression. It’s not meant to be read from cover to cover, but you’ll have a great time dotting around in it. Guaranteed you’ll make loads of notes yourself in your own turn – memorable quotes, jokes, revelatory perceptions, writers you’d never heard of whom all of a sudden you really want to read.

If you’ve ever enjoyed any of Clive James’s writing – reviews, memoirs, songs, whatever – don’t hesitate. It’s a book to keep with you always and to keep returning to.

My book of the year
Following some explicit hints to my daughter, I was delighted to receive this as a Father's Day gift. I consider myself a fairly well-read person, but only in the extremely limited sense of having read just about everything Clive James has ever written, ranging from his TV reviews, literary criticism, autobiography, novels and verse to his lyrics for singer-songwriter Pete Atkin. More broadly, what I've read in his books has introduced me to other writers, and it's always been entertaining to see his opinion (particularly when it's not high) on books which I've already read.

There's more of the same in this book, but its scale and structure dwarfs anything he's produced up until now. Some four years in the writing, it's been viewed as the culmination of his life's work (although he's rumoured to have already started work on a second volume). At first glance, it's a collection of more than a hundred critical essays on selected cultural or historical figures, mostly from 20th century Europe. Digging deeper reveals other things, as he uses his ideas about the person as a jumping-off point for musings on other topics such as plagarism, fame, memory, reading, grammar and bibliophilia.

His range of reference is extraordinary, taking in books written in German, French, Italian and Spanish (all of which he apparently reads fluently). There's a strong didactic element running through this work, as he breaks off to give advice on the most profitable way to learn languages, the best dictionaries and translations, and which books are most easily used as a starting point for breaking into a specific language. He also tells stories of the tracking down of books in shops all over the world that are explicit - even loving - in their physical detail as he describes their bindings, typeface and paper, and how they look on his shelves at home.

His main theme here, however, is culture and the struggles of liberal humanism against totalitarianism. This is clearly a big subject, and each one of these essays illuminates it from a slightly different angle until you're left feeling wiser, older and sadder at the heroism and destruction that inspired this work. Along the way, his lively and playful turns of phrase are enough to make you start making notes in the margin yourself - to take just one example at random, on p498 he describes the constant need to refresh our memory of good things that we've read as "a polishing of the pipe, like El Dorado's throat". I'm sure I won't read a better book this year, and perhaps for some time to come afterwards as well.

An exhilarating read!
I was alerted to this book not by reading reviews but by hearing a podcast of an interview with James on the BBC Artsworld programme. The book is long (some 870 pages), broad and deep. It is not an easy read, but since it comprises a set of essays, the difficulties can be taken in digestible chunks. I also found it it instructive to read the book (at least in part) out of sequential order, for example tackling articles on more familiar figures or authors first, or perhaps following up references from one of these to the less familiar, say from Sartre to Revel. Each essay uses the technique of taking an aphorism and then either discussing it, taking it apart, disagreeing with it, using it as a springboard for an intellectual journey, sometimes labyrinthine, or occasionally all of these. However the result is always stimulating. A recurring theme is the opposition of liberal humanitarian democracy and the various forms of totalitarianism in the 20th century. In fact he comes out strongly against ideologies of any kind, that is, preliminary syntheses or simplistic theories of reality, or political doctrines. He reminds us that it was not inevitable that for example the Weimar Republic failed, or that Hitler came to power, and that both of these depended on many things coming together in a particular way. The book thus has powerful messages for us in the 21st century, and indeed we can see mistakes of the 20th Century being repeated today for example in the Neo-Conservative ideologies that led to the Iraq war, Abu-graib, Guantanamo Bay and many thousands of dead. On the so-called war against terror I would particulaly recommend the essay on Virginio Rognoni, which explores the pros and cons of terrorism and leaves the reader to make up his own mind. Particularly interesting is the light he sheds through his readings of literature in the original languages, which include German, French, Spanish and Italian, among others, with handy tips as to which works could be profitably tackled even by beginners in the languages. The occasional original language quotations (with parallel English translations) whet the appetite for further reading , and a quick visit to Amazon.de and Amazon.fr (for example) shows that a significant part of this original language material is available at a reasonable price. I am looking forward to following up the various authors and can thoroughly recommend this excellent book.