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the complete review - fiction

Memoirs of Many in One

by
Patrick White

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : well written, often amusing, but not our cup o' tea

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries

Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
London Rev. of Books	.	8/5/1986	Philip Horne
Macleans'	.	20/10/1986	John Bemrose
The NY Times Book Rev.	B	26/10/1986	Jonathan Baumbach
Publishers Weekly	.	15/8/1986	.

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers.

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The complete review's Review:

       Memoirs of Many in One is a memoir ostensibly written by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray and edited by her friend, Patrick White. Ms. Gray, of advanced age and questionable mental balance, is not an authorial guise that appeals to us. White always writes well, and there are some exceptional passages here (and some brutally funny ones as well), but Gray's meandering and confused narrative is both too much and too little for us. "It's about premature senility," White described the book, promising that: "it's a very funny subject." Possibly so, but we were less amused.
       White's honesty and disregard for whom he might offend is commendable. Nevertheless, we could not entirely warm to the book. It lacks the focus of his other works, and while of similar breadth it covers far too much in too few pages. An interesting read, we can not say that we truly liked it. Hesitantly recommended.

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Links:

• Text publicity page
• Introduction by Sophie Cunningham

• The complete review's Patrick White page.
• Patrick White at books and writers
• Nobel Prize for Literature, 1973

• The Aunt's Story
• Big Toys
• The Cockatoos
• The Eye of the Storm
• A Fringe of Leaves
• The Hanging Garden
• Happy Valley
• The Living and the Dead
• Patrick White Speaks
• Riders in the Chariot
• Signal Driver
• The Solid Mandala
• Three Uneasy Pieces
• The Twyborn Affair
• The Vivisector
• Voss

• See Index of Australian literature at the complete review
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review

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About the Author:

       Patrick White (1912-1990), Australian author. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. Schooled in England (at Cheltenham, and King's College, Cambridge). His first novel Happy Valley was published in 1939. Worked for R.A.F Intelligence during WWII, after which he returned to Australia.

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