Miss-Delectable
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-"My Father's Fortune: A Life" by Michael Frayn; Metropolitan Books (273 pages, $25)
It doesn't seem possible - playwright and novelist Michael Frayn's father, Tom, born in 1901, grew up in a family with two deaf parents and three deaf siblings. Tom Frayn became deaf in middle age. His son, Michael, has written 10 novels and some 16 plays. "My Father's Fortune" is a memoir muttered under the author's breath - he talks to himself, asks himself whether he is exaggerating, whether his memory is playing tricks. His father emerges from these pages as a character in a black homburg, mysterious and loving.
The son disappoints - he can't play cricket and he's slow-witted. He remembers his mother, Vi, and tries to reconstruct his parents' happy marriage. He remembers the sounds of bombs at night in 1944, when he was 11, and his mother's death soon after the war. Frayn blinks at each new detail of his father's life and even his own - the way we feel looking back at our own lives with wonder. So that's why we did that! So that's how we really felt! His father's frugality, his life as an asbestos salesman, his patience and his grief all merge. And with these memories, a little guilt - why can't we feel more, express more when the people we love are still living?
It doesn't seem possible - playwright and novelist Michael Frayn's father, Tom, born in 1901, grew up in a family with two deaf parents and three deaf siblings. Tom Frayn became deaf in middle age. His son, Michael, has written 10 novels and some 16 plays. "My Father's Fortune" is a memoir muttered under the author's breath - he talks to himself, asks himself whether he is exaggerating, whether his memory is playing tricks. His father emerges from these pages as a character in a black homburg, mysterious and loving.
The son disappoints - he can't play cricket and he's slow-witted. He remembers his mother, Vi, and tries to reconstruct his parents' happy marriage. He remembers the sounds of bombs at night in 1944, when he was 11, and his mother's death soon after the war. Frayn blinks at each new detail of his father's life and even his own - the way we feel looking back at our own lives with wonder. So that's why we did that! So that's how we really felt! His father's frugality, his life as an asbestos salesman, his patience and his grief all merge. And with these memories, a little guilt - why can't we feel more, express more when the people we love are still living?