Rating: 
Summary: For Roth junkies only; a guilty pleasure
Review: Ok, I admit and I am embarrassed--I ate this book up like a pint of Haagen-Daz. And afterwards, I felt about the same as I do when I look at the empty ice cream container: a little shamed, vaguely nauseous, highly satisfied. I am a huge Philip Roth fan, a collector of his signed first editions, etc., so you have to take this reveiw with a grain of salt. Ms. Bloom, or whoever ghosted it, is much better writer than I had anticipated and the pages flew by (just one more spoonful...). Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Gore Vidal, Rod Steiger--it was interesting to read what felt like highly redacted versions of who these men were in Ms. Bloom's life. She does seem to reserve a certainy clarity and honesty for her depiction of Roth, for better or worse, than she seems willing to give to these other men. I, frankly, believe most if not all of what she wrote about Roth, and it is tantalizing to watch the threads of her fact with him reverberate in his fiction. (Sylphid, the harp-playing harpy in "I Married A Communist" is very openly Bloom's daughter with Rod Steiger). So if you are a Roth fan and are interested in a painful dissection of his fiction, you should probably put this on your shelf...though don't expect HIM to appreciate it.
Rating: 
Summary: Hysteria in Bloomland
Review: Relationships are sticky things, and people standing outside of a particular one can never completely emphathize and get the full picture. That being said, as a reader of Bloom's memoir, one feels darned ready to pass judgment, and not so much on the men (especially Philip Roth) who have messed up parts of her life. The way in which the book was written, its tone, its texture, leads me to believe that it is Bloom herself that is being unjust and slanted in judgment. For some reason she seems to gravitate toward men who she knows will screw her over. The most significant beau is Roth. Everyone knows he's the bad boy of contemporary American letters, and it's a good thing, too. It feeds his writing in unbelievable ways, ways in which might earn him a Nobel someday (if there's any justice in the world). And perhaps Bloom's wonderful acting ability is fueled by her emotional problems too. Art, like relationships, is indeed an unstable and unpredictable thing, but reading Bloom complain--almost whine--about how she's been wronged as a victim really grates on this reader. If her turmoil does fuel her art, then perhaps that old saying about sausage is true: if you really like it, you don't want to see how it is made.
Rating: 
Summary: Hasn't Claire Bloom ever heard of Co-Dependency?
Review: This book left me with a distressingly bad taste in my heart! While the account of her early years makes for decent reading, Ms.Bloom's glaring lack of learning and GROWTH from her failed relationships with men is disturbing, even angering to read. Despite a brief sentence or two of some insight on how abandonment by her father led to her disasterous choices, a few pages later she crushes any "hoorah-FINALLY" the reader might feel when she again meets with the clearly disturbed misogynist Roth after their terrible divorce, and allows him to abuse her yet again. One has to wonder if Bloom even read over her own manuscript-she is either very brave, or very obtuse!
Rating:
Summary: Waaaah!
Review: Waaaaah! I had an unhappy love affair and now I think I'll make the world feel sorry for me because this has never happened to another single human being in the history of human relations! Waaaaah!(You don't see Roth trying to exorcise his demons by acting, do you? He knows his strengths, as should Miss Gloom.)
|
