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Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography

por Norman Lewis

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With his trademark dry, laconic wit, Norman Lewis recounts his youth and development as one of the twentieth century's greatest travel writers.
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Fine autobiogaph of Lewis' upbringing in Carmarthen with three eccentric aunts, his spiritualist parents in Enfield and open marriage to the daughter of a London dwelling Mafia exile.
Includes war memories from Phillipeville, Algeria and Tunis. This last section is a study in war's absurdities as seen through the experience of a British intelligence unit. Lewis' sympathies lie with the local inhabitant who is so misunderstood and mistreated by the military imposed upon him/her. He baldly shows how bitter and cruel these relationships can be.
  ivanfranko | Sep 9, 2016 |
I picked this up almost at random, and realised after a couple of chapters that I'd made a silly mistake and confused Norman Lewis with another celebrated (but very different) travel writer, Norman Douglas. But by that time I was so intrigued and amused by the story of the three eccentric Welsh aunts that I carried on reading anyway...

Lewis's technique as a writer seems to be to focus on the oddnesses in the people around him, much as Evelyn Waugh does, but he has a sympathetic way of bringing these out in the text that leaves his subjects with much more of their self-respect and human dignity intact. There are obvious overlaps with the subject-matter of Waugh, Powell and Greene (they all belonged to roughly the same generation, of course), and sometimes you feel that Lewis, writing in 1985, may have borrowed a bit from his predecessors (the captain and sergeant-major in Lewis's field security unit certainly made me think of Waugh's Hound and Ludovic, for instance). But Lewis has a very engaging quality of his own, and having at last discovered him, I certainly want to read some more of his books. ( )
  thorold | Apr 28, 2015 |
Picked this up in a charity shop. A wonderful, if partial, auto-biography, of the authors' life from infancy to the immediate post-war period, when he would have been about forty two , or thereabouts. The first of Lewis' work I have read. It was expanded into a later, longer autobiog. published under a different title, I understand. Full of unexpected nuggets. There is something terrific about reading the erudite autobiography of a man you knew nothing about; it's something of a mystery tour. Rather struck by the description of Edwardian Llanstephan: "There was no more beautiful, wilder or stranger place in the British Isles." ( )
  Quickpint | Oct 5, 2014 |
A strange book. Not that this great author’s prose is strange, just that his early upbringing was, as he “farmed out” to be brought up by three mad, or at the very least, extremely eccentric Welsh spinster Aunts, whose raucous feuding sometimes required the intercession of a male relative to reestablish some measure of parity and peace. As the author grew to love them, to adapt and mature, it fell to his lot in turn, to be the peacemaker. The jackdaw cake of the title was real – but it was a cake that the ladies baked weekly to feed to the jackdaws infestation - both indoors and out - of this weird household.

Eventually he was able to return to his parent’s London home, to join them in their séances, table-knocking, trances and hosting the mediums of the fashionable afterlife. Small wonder that he soon grasped the opportunity of entering the war, as a Field Intelligence Officer, and to then launch his traveling life that led to his becoming a great author. This volume precedes his wonderful Naples ‘44. (http://www.librarything.com/work/64352)
1 vote John_Vaughan | Sep 9, 2012 |
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Since Jackdaw Cake is subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, between inverted commas, we might think of the book as ‘unreliable memoirs’. The first two parts of the book, about his childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of him as a superior anthropologist heartlessly inspecting lesser breeds, for he has already played the Martian in Britain: perhaps all children are ‘Martian’. The fourth and final section of the book is mostly about his wartime experiences, as a sergeant in Intelligence. His friends, he tells us, when he announced his intention of becoming a writer, urged him not to bore his readers with war stories. So he wrote 14 other books before the celebrated Naples ’44, and now he ends his memoir with equally interesting war stories, largely about Algeria and Tunis, which are quite relevant to the preceding sections but take a slightly different tone.
adicionada por John_Vaughan | editarLondon Review, D A N Jones (sítio Web pago) (Aug 23, 1986)
 
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With his trademark dry, laconic wit, Norman Lewis recounts his youth and development as one of the twentieth century's greatest travel writers.

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