Thursday 19 September 2013

If You Ever

come across a copy of 'A Part of Myself: Portrait of an Epoch' by Carl Zuckmayer, read it. It's an autobiography recounting the most hilarious life and person. There are truly hair-raising parts, eg when he is living in Berlin in the early 1920s and venturing to take up a criminal career out of sheer necessity without actually being fit for it, or when he narrowly escapes the Nazis in Austria, taking one of the last trains out. What really intrigues me is the coincidences like the story of a tapestry, that he oddly encounters again. Probably it's sometimes the little things that are the most miraculous.
There are simply so many different 'lives' this man has lived as soldier in WWI, as honoured playwright, as short-lived Hollywood screen writer or as farmer in Vermont and it's refreshing to see how each time he manages to make the best of it, a book full of hope. A book also dedicated to all the friends he had and lost, those who survived, those who died, those by whom he felt betrayed. As this, it is a great document of his appreciation and love and sometimes also disappointment.


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