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Against the Wind: An Autobiography
In his autobiography, 'Against the Wind,' novelist Geoffrey Household tells us the story of his own life, showing us the background and the experiences, droll and sometimes hazardous, from which he emerged as a writer. A graduate of Oxford, he was slated for a career in the Civil Service, but instead he went to Romania as an apprentice-clerk in the Ottoman Bank. His next a
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Household is a charming narrator. I wouldn't rate this as highly as the best of his novels (of which I've only read the terrific
Rogue Male
so far), but he's had an unusual life and is atypically British: that is, very open to other ways of life, a lover of Spain and the Spanish, a linguist. The sections are titled: Traveller, Soldier, Craftsman. Soldier, the middle section, is the longest and least interesting (to me). I admit I skipped some of it. But...there are adventures and observations fo
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Author of many thrillers and adventure novels, Geoffrey Household’s own life was as full of thrills and adventures as that of any of his heroes. A peripatetic life, first in business and commerce, later in the military during WWII, his trajectory was anything but ordinary. He even managed to fit in a couple of marriages and a couple of children – not that he gives them any prominence in this autobiography. A fascinating life, certainly, but this account of it is very dry and on occasion even ted
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British author of mostly thrillers, though among 37 books he also published children's fiction. Household's flight-and-chase novels, which show the influence of John Buchan, were often narrated in the first person by a gentleman-adventurer. Among his best-know works is' Rogue Male' (1939), a suggestive story of a hunter who becomes the hunted, in 1941 filmed by Fritz Lang as 'Man Hunt'. Household'
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More about Geoffrey Household...
“Taken aback by the discovery, a little too late, that tropical rain has the volume of a bathroom shower, I splashed on to a train for Panama City, put up at the Hotel Europa and restored equanimity with Planter’s Punch. A world in which so delectable a drink existed, as well as the thirst necessary to deal with two successive pints of it, could not be wholly bad. In the evening I set out to inspect North American civilisation.”
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“The full essence of Americanism in the Canal Zone is too overwhelming a contrast to the Spanish-American city. And that is a violent way to taste a new country. You might as well get your first impression of the British from the Gezireh Club in Cairo. Clean, self-consciously bright, admirably ordered for the consumption of ice-cream in friendly surroundings—that was my melancholy impression. The result to this day is that when I think of the United States, its aspect as a respectable middle-class holiday camp dominates all others. And that is unfair. If I had entered by New York, I should have found the stronger living and coarser laughter to which I was accustomed translated across the Atlantic into a city of exquisite beauty, with green and peaceful farming country easily to be reached at need. But there it is. My emotions insist that every American lives in a well-ordered suburb, whereas statistics, let alone observation, prove he does nothing of the sort. I am closer, perhaps, to a spiritual truth—for it is undeniable that the nearer any foreign community approaches the ideal of a garden city run by a council of advertising managers, the more Americans are at home in it.”
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