Biography and Memoir
Kamala in India, he seduced Sukanya (who lived in London) then impregnated his American tour manager, Sue Jones, in Los Angeles.’ Pendlebury noted Shankar’s twin passions of sex and the sitar: ‘Deeply moved while playing, he wrote to a friend: “It was as if the sitar became the torso of a beautiful woman and I was making love to it – tenderly – ardently and wildly!”’
Even though he became its darling, ‘Shankar disliked many aspects of the hippy scene,’ said Pendlebury. He ‘played at Woodstock, but found it “impossible to connect to the vast crowd”. The audience, sitting stoned in mud “reminded me of water buffaloes in India”.’
APROPOS OF NOTHING AUTOBIOGRAPHY WOODY ALLEN
Arcade, 400pp, £25, ebook £15.49
‘As one might expect from a writer with his comic pedigree,’ wrote Fiona Sturges in the Guardian, ‘Allen’s style is gossipy and spry when dealing with his childhood and rise to fame... Self-deprecation is Allen’s default setting and his bleak humour can be winning... Elsewhere, however, egotism tramples wit.’ In her
Observer review, Rachel Cooke found the book to be ‘a mixed bag. If he can write (obviously, he can), and if he is, at points, surprisingly honest (eye-poppingly so, on occasion), then he can also be a bore and a selfdeceiver... I regard it as both disgraceful and alarming that Hachette, his original publisher, gutlessly dropped his book following a walkout by some of its staff – and that though I was sometimes repulsed by it myself, I was also fascinated, even entertained.’
Allen biographer David Evanier, in a review for the online magazine
Quillette, called it a ‘calm, blithe, and objective memoir’ and noted that ‘Allen emerges, at wild odds with his comedic persona, as a very tough, independent artist, a passionate lover of women, avowing his innocence of the one and only charge ever levelled against him in 84 years.’ In claiming to have been ‘taken unawares by the full brunt’ of his ex-partner Mia Farrow’s assault when she discovered his relationship with her adopted daughter Soon-yi and subsequently accused him in 1992 of sexually abusing another adopted daughter, Dylan, he ‘paints himself as the naif that in fact he may very well be, but it does not absolve him of obliviousness and a curious lack of self-reflection’.
BROKEN GREEK A STORY OF CHIP SHOPS AND POP SONGS PETE PAPHIDES
Quercus, 585pp, £20
This childhood memoir ‘opens with Paphides as the son of Greek-cypriot immigrants whose dream of a better life has them frying fish six days a week in a Birmingham suburb’, explained Jackie Annesley in the
Sunday Times. ‘Life was spent in two very different cultural spaces,’ said the Guardian’s John Harris. ‘This seems to have contributed to… his decision to stop talking to anyone apart from his mother, father and brother – what a child psychologist would call selective mutism. “A Trip switch had activated itself in my head and it was best for me not to talk.”’
‘Paphides,’ explained Annesley, ‘is riddled with insecurities and phobias, including only speaking to his family between the ages of four and seven, and embraces British pop culture to educate himself “when parents have no parenting left in them”.’
‘His silence is finally broken in 1977,’ said Alan Johnson in the New
Statesman. ‘By then young Pete is so in love with pop music that he’d lift his parents’ telephone receiver most days… listening to British Telecom’s Dial-a-disc service. Pop music for him, is “a place where the big issues were addressed”. Waterloo by Abba was a history lesson; Roxanne by the Police taught him about prostitution...
‘“All the music I liked was performed by people who might feasibly step in and take care of me if something happened to my parents,” [Paphides] writes. Lynsey de Paul, Kiki Dee and Sting were contenders,’ Annesley noted.
‘The options available when it all gets too much include two polar opposites,’ Harris concluded. ‘One is the silence Paphides adopted when he was three. The other is the glorious noise that eased him back into the world.’
‘It was as if the sitar became the torso of a beautiful woman’