Try to Tell the Story (Hardcover) ~ David Thomson (Author) Cover Art

Try to Tell the Story (Hardcover)

By: David Thomson (Author)

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Review

"David Thomson, best known as a historian and critic of film, has now written a fascinating memoir of growing up in London...It reminds us...that virtually all autobiographical and biographical accounts reveal the infinite variety of the human experience."

"TRY TO TELL THE STORY is a fine book, modest and self-effacing but also forthright and uncompromising."

"[Thomson's] charming...memoir...is the most intimate book yet from this most personal, intellectually present of critics, and it is largely about absence....Thomson has learned to trust nothing so much as the permanence of the movies, which change only and always in the viewer's mind."

Publisher's note

A celebrated film critic describes his youth in south London during the mid-1940s and late-1950s, growing up with his mother, grandmother, and an upstairs tenant following the abandonment of his father, describing a city still affected by the devastation of war and discussing the influence on and comfort of film in his life. 20,000 first printing.

One of our most celebrated film critics and historians now gives us the story of his first eighteen years, growing up an only child in south London in the mid-forties and late fifties. At the heart of this story is David Thomson's profound sadness at being abandoned by his father, who visits only on weekends, and keeps, as Thomson later discovers, another household.
A matriarchy of his mother, grandmother, and an upstairs tenant, Miss Davis, raises him, to which he adds an imaginary sister, Sally. Thomson gives a vivid picture of London in the aftermath of the war, whether it is his grandmother bringing him to a street corner to see Churchill, or the bombed-out houses that still smelled of smoke where, though forbidden, he played. Movies were his great escape, and the worlds revealed in "Henry V, Red River, The Third Man, "and "Citizen Kane "became part of his rich, imaginative life, one that would gain him a scholarship to public and eventually film school. And though his father put on skits with him, took him to see the stars of cricket, tennis, boxing, and soccer, he could never really give this stammering boy the affection he needed.
Romantic, restrained, and tautly written, "Try to Tell the Story "is a haunting and unsentimental look at the fragility of family relationships.

Annotation

David Thomson, best known for his film criticism, documents his childhood in postwar London in this profound and engaging memoir, which focuses on the development of his vivid imagination. Thomson's story is haunted by his missing father, who lived with another family and visited only on weekends, casting a pall of sorrow over young David's boyhood years. He recalls that he dealt with his father's absence through his imaginary sister, Sally, and by transforming the demolished buildings of his neighborhood into a massive playground. Later, he discovered movies to be an extension of his own imagination, and he lovingly recalls some of his favorites, including RED RIVER, THE THIRD MAN, and CITIZEN KANE.

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