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3.0 

The Man Within My Head

By Pico Iyer
The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

We all carry people inside our heads—actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know.
 
In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery. Iyer follows Greene’s trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene but his own father, or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself.
 
Drawing upon experiences across the globe, from Cuba to Bhutan, and moving, as Greene would, from Sri Lanka in war to intimate moments of introspection; trying to make sense of his own past, commuting between the cloisters of a fifteenth-century boarding school and California in the 1960s, one of our most resourceful explorers of crossing cultures gives us his most personal and revelatory book.

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5 Reviews

3.0
“I didn’t dislike the book enough to stop reading it, yet I was grateful when it ended. From the time I began the book to its conclusion, I read five other books. Not a good sign. I love Graham Greene (one of my favorite authors, although he sounds like a horrible man) and I also enjoy reading about Iyer’s travels. What could go wrong? One of the problems I have is that the author, at times, turns into a fanboy. This came up in a few of his other books. In one his hero was Leonard Cohen, and in another the Dalai Lama. All Iyer’s praise dragged down the writing. The ironic thing is that he is at his most interesting when he’s talking about himself and his own experiences. So I’d say parts of the book rated five stars, but others bored me to tears. I advise potential readers to think twice before taking the plunge. .”
“The intrepid cultural explorer Pico Iyer reveals with unnerving candour his innate and inherent fascination for Graham Greene the author and Graham Green the eccentric yet fallible human being. This fascination is succinctly linked to Iyer's relationship with his own father - a formidable connoisseur of literature himself.”

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