Memoirs of Montparnasse

By: John Glassco

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Paperback | 29 January 2007 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
296 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.3 x 13.7 x 1.5

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In 1928, the nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped an overbearing father and the dreariness of North American university life for the wilder shores of Montparnasse, the haunt of geniuses from Modigliani and Brancusi to Hemingway and Man Ray, not to mention a legendarily limitless source of sex and booze. He remained there for more than a year, until his money ran out and his health failed, in the course of which he ran into everyone who was anyone and had the time of his life. Sex and parties fill Glassco's memoirs of that period, but the truly extraordinary thing about this book is its honesty, humor, and perfect youthfulness of spirit. Page follows page with the daft logic of an unpredictable but utterly absorbing adventure, leading from bedroom to barroom to beach and on, and such is the easy, confident charm of Glassco's prose that the reader is unfailingly surprised and delighted. In the end, MEMOIRS OF MONTARNASSE is less a tale of a particular time and place than it is a delightful hymn to a life of abandon in a never-never land of effortlessly fulfilled desire.

Industry Reviews

"It's wonderful to see John Glassco's charming Memoirs of Montparnasse getting the international recognition it deserves. Like its author -- whom I knew quite well in the 1960s -- the book is a loveable and eccentric rogue, fond of style and up to mischief. It never fails to entertain." -- Margaret Atwood

"Memoirs of Montparnasse is one of the most joyous books on youth -- the thrill and the gall and the adventure of it. It is also one of the best books on being in literary Paris in the 1920s." --Michael Ondaatje

"[Memoirs of Montparnasse] should be read and at last recognized as the most dramatic of the many narratives dealing with Paris in the 1920's." --The New York Times

"The title calls to mind a whole genre of books...But Glassco's book, published from a manuscript nearly forty years old, is fresher and truer to the moment than the others, as well as being more novelistic and, in a sense, legendary."--The New Republic

"A very good book, perhaps a great book." --The Washington Star

"The best book of prose by a Canadian that I've ever read." --Montreal Gazette

"This is a delightful, on-the-spot report of the days when it was still possible to be very young, very hip and very happy all at the same time...this precious, witty document from a long-vanished younger generation has both the freshness and remoteness of some ornate space ship found intact in a forgotten tomb." --The New York Times

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