Unreliable Memoirs

As a person unfamiliar with Australian geography and even less familiar with Australian cultural references, I merely liked this book. Clive James does a fantastic job in setting up many of the anecdotes he relates in the various chapters here. However, as an American who is merely semi-well traveled, I did not get many of the inside jokes. It is easy to see how funny this book could be if you really were tracking with the culture he grew up in.This, however, is more of the reader's problem rather than the writer's. The tales related range from sadly familiar (dead father, incredibly caring mother, indifferent son) to some of the truly funniest writing imaginable (trying to tackle a world class rugby player; a chapter entitled The Sound of Mucus). James is really great. There are stories in here that everyone can relate to and it is all told in a way that is sharp in sensational details and vague on everything in between. If I could dump my memories into a book, this is probably what it would be like; only less funny and more stupidly written.Broaden your horizons and read the book. It is a short read and will have you looking something up in Wikipedia at least once every few minutes.

Jargon trying to be past (current) with a strong sense of the terrible turmoil such a person brings to helpful, kind, and empathic folks. I'm not sorry to have missed him.

I really enjoyed this book, read it in two days, the description of life in Australia then is so different to life for children growing up in todays world, and although the stories are "unreliable", the reality would have been very close. My disappointment was in actual fact the "unreliable" part. I wanted to be reading this as a real story, and had to keep bringing myself back to the reality that a lot of this was not true. Disappointing but I knew before I started reading that it wasn't exactly reality,but there is a part of you that wants it to be. I guess if I wrote a story of my life the memory would have altered to what had really happened. Entertaining and a great commentary on the time and the places. Any Sydneysider would enjoy visiting the places of their childhood through this book. I now want to read the rest of his books.

I bought this book because it was well reviewed by many credible reviewers and was said to be "laugh out loud" funny. Perhaps I should have been suspicious when such a tiresome cliche was used. This is a fairly typical story of a young boy in a time when children could run loose and endanger their own and others' lives. This one happens in Australia and follows the author through our equivalent of grade school to college, living with his widowed mother. Most of the very young years are tales about how he and his friends did incredibly stupid things while the adults were either very dense or just assumed that dangerous play was the best way to weed out the keepers. Happily, this book was written before we publically pilloried authors for "improving" the story. Nonetheless, I really found the whole thing quite boring and began to hope he would kill himself. As he went off to school, I found it funnier, but only made it up to a smirk, not even a chuckle. However, I did finish the book. I think that this book would have been enjoyed more by someone who had been less cautious as a child and wasn't a mother now. Forgive me, I know this is genderist, but I could see many men recognizing themselves in this book and maybe they are the people who were laughing. It wasn't me.

I have to confess that I read this book over a considerable period of time picking it up occasionally and then finally finishing the last half recently. It's very clever and, at times anyway, laugh out loud funny. That's a fairly rare quality in a book. I couldn't decide on four or five stars as it's well written (of course, being Clive James),very readable and very funny. I settled on the four because obviously it didn't engage me enough to read it right through immediately. On the other hand it is the sort of book you can pick up and put down again being really a series of episodes in James life. I won't presume to review Clive James but if you are familiar with him you will probably love this book.

Having recently (Sept 2013) watched Kerrie O'Brien's interview on the ABC (Australia) I realised that I'd never read Clive James' memoirs even though I've always enjoyed his wit. I finished this volume in about a day and was left keen to hear about his exploits in the UK as a young man, so quickly downloaded Falling Towards England. I grew up not far from where Clive James spent his youth, though some years later and was full of nostalgia in remembering Sydney's southern suburbs when they were less busy and such innocent suburbs to be living in. I laughed out loud so often while I was reading and had to frequently read out passages to my bemused husband to bring him in on the joke. Clive James' self-deprecating sense of humour would have you believe that he was a no-hoper much of the time, which of course simply can't have been true. In not taking himself too seriously you feel that you get to know the boy and the man. This was a feel-good read.

Was reading this book on a long-haul flight between Auckland and London. The people in the next seats were looking at me as if I was mad. Shoulders shaking with laughter and a head full of supressed giggles for almost the entire flight!! They wanted to know what was so funny, and will probably end up buying their own copies of Unreliable Memoirs. I have rarely enjoyed a book so much, and although I was brought up at the other end of our planet, there was so much that reminded me of my own childhood - except for the spiders, snakes, sharks and sunny hot weather..................

A great read

A good place to start exploring the Clive James story. The humour level is kept consistently high throughout although this first volume ends before we have much of a chance to discover how Clive, the juvenile builder of muddy tunnels in suburban Sydney, becomes or grows into the highly literate and multi-talented Clive that we know from the start of the 1970's onwards. To be honest I've always preferred his pop song lyrics (with Pete Atkins orchestration) to his stand alone poetry but everyone has their favourite periods and "Driving Through Mythical America" was mine. I was quite touched by his frequent reminiscencing about going to the cinema with his mum (4 feature films a week?): it explains how he became such a well respected film critic later on and why some of his lyrics have such a cinematic quality to them. It probably also helps to have such a prodigious memory.

I bought this after listening to an extract on the BBC. Problem is the extract contained the few genuinely laugh out loud ‘best bits’ - it all became very difficult to read after chapter 3, a disappointing purchase given the many gushing reviews on here.

I just about finished reading it - I was still contemplating not bothering at 90% read.There are some very funny bits - but not enough. Other bits ranged from quite funny, to testing on keeping my attention.There are too many literature references to which I'm not familiar my education and experience being more technical, and in fact some of the vocabulary seemed unnecessarily unusual. I found some of the literary high-brow stuff quite irritating.I recognise this opinion is in the minority - but I mainly want to have my rating recorded so Amazon do not give this any weight in recommendations for me!

Anyone who hasn't heard of Clive James, I can highly recommend any of his TV shows and his books. He was a hugely funny social commentator, whose outlook on life and all its eccentric characters, was highly comical and entertaining.His books are full of that dry, Australian humour, we all came to love. He was very popular in our household. His series of biographies will have you in hysterics. Well worth a read and a very welcome distraction, in these difficult times.

While reading this memoir I could hear the voice of the young Clive James. I often found myself not really liking the man, but he has said he wasn't a particularly nice younger man. The stories he tells are unreliable because all of our memories are unreliable, unless we keep a diary details change or get lost. I have spent quite a lot of time in the area he grew up in so it was interesting to read how Sydney changed from the unsophisticated city of his youth that he and many others were so keen to escape, to the vibrant city it is today. . It is laugh out loud funny in parts, brutal in others but is never less than beautifully, flowingly written. The book ends as he first arrives in England. I enjoyed reading the book very much and can wholeheartedly recommend it.