RARA-AVIS: something about a soldier

From: Michael Robison ( zspider@gte.net)
Date: 20 Jan 2002


>betsy said:

> Something About a Soldier isn't intended to be a memoir of a writer's
life,
> but a bildungsroman, a growing-up-absurd, a rites of passage story in the
> manner of The Woman in White, Slaughterhouse-5 and a hundred thousand
others
> in which an innocent someone learns about the corrupt possibilities of the
> world.

thanks for responding, betty. a bildungs what? ;-)

yes. now that i've read them i know that. when i got the collected memoirs i thought the first was about his childhood and the second started with his service and continued thru at least part of his literary life.

as it was, i was pretty disappointed. from the brilliant _burnt orange heresy_ to the bland memoirs. didn't hardly seem like the same author. now there were some good parts in it, like where he watched the tagalog (sp?) woman give birth. the "coming of age" thru riding the rails and doing the armed forces just didn't seem that... important. its not hard to get a hardboiled view of the world. you can read the papers and do that.

miker

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