A Postcard Memoir

Rating:
Summary: This man is a god!
Review: Anyone who has ever sent a postcard will be stunned and enthralled by this fascinating collection, which also includes his own intriguing inner dialogue. As a postcard connoisseur, I can only say, this man understands what it's all about!

Rating:
Summary: My favorite undiscovered writer
Review: I can't believe Lawrence Sutin has written another book - and this one is even better than the last two. What a fascinating way to structure the story of his life - by using favorite postcards that inspire memories of days gone by. I loved his book about Phillip K Dick - and the one he wrote with his parents, about their Holocaust experiences, is must-read stuff. But this one is the best yet - by turns fanciful, touching and downright funny. Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Gift from a Talented Writer
Review: Larry has an interesting life problem -- he's the son of Holocaust survivors. His mom and dad met behind enemy lines in Poland, hiding from the Nazis -- a remarkable story he details in his tribute to their experience, Jack and Rochelle. He reveres and loves his parents, but their experience has had the effect of throwing his life into a sort of unheroic (by comparison) shadow.

Yet he has soldiered on. Larry is a gnostic by nature. By this I mean to say that Larry is, as near as I can tell, very brilliant, with a special knack for tackling arcane topics.

He wrote a celebrated analysis of speculative fiction writer Philip K. Dick a decade ago , and has followed that up with something even more Byzantine, a full-fledged biography of Aleister Crowley (Do What Thou Wilt, A Life of Aleister Crowley.

But in the meantime, he took time to create a perfectly wonderful mini-autobiography called A Postcard Memoir. It is a series of portraits from his life, thumbnails of people who have touched him, along with a few philosophical observations. The "gimmick" or hook that these 400-word wonders hang on is that each is accompanied by an antique picture postcard, which Graywolf Press has lovingly reproduced.

It is a gimmick which works smashingly. First, it is a natural one -- Larry collects postcards, and uses favorite cards as reverie objects, staring into them until the faces and places he doesn't know and hasn't visited spur a personal association inside him. A postcard labeled "Smartly Dressed Young Man" depicts "a young man of angular but easy good looks, earnestness and wit, [and] a taste for faintly wicked pranks." The picture bears an eerie resemblance to Larry's friend Bob, who can be charged with those same defects.

So Larry's essay describes his friendship with Bob, how they met as young writers (though "his subject matter was the borderlines of clarity and mine the chasm of chaos") concluding with the realization that "the best friends of my life were people who would let me be in their company and somewhat copy them."

In one essaylet after another, Sutin is unstintingly honest about what he takes to be his own defects -- an obscurity of thought, a painful bashfulness, and a feeling of not being quite right for this world -- feelings alien to all but himself.

I have only scratched the surface of his concerns. He writes about his parents, lost loves, his beloved children, his wife Mab, who from these writings appears to have been FedExed to Larry overnight from heaven, about jobs and opportunities, places that are real, and places that exist only in dreams.

It is a book of tremendous intimacy because we get to look at Larry's life in all its pimply everydayness -- but it is magical, too, because the pictures are so beautiful, and transport us into our own unspoken memoirs. It's a wonderful gift from a talented writer.

Rating:
Summary: I love the creativity and texture of this book
Review: Using the visual medium of postcards coupled with creativity and philosophy and memoir of Lawrence Sutin's words gives this work life, punch and texture. It's a great work to spur your own creativity - and to satisfy the voyeuristic urge in all of us. I wish there were more truly original pieces of literature like this.