Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

MY YOUNG LIFE

Frederic Tuten

A Memoir

An enchanting literary memoir from novelist Frederic Tuten about his coming-of-age in mid-century New York.

Frederic Tuten dropped out of High School at 15 to become a painter and live in Paris. He took odd jobs and studied briefly at the Art Students League, and eventually went back to school, continuing on to earn a Ph. D. in early 19th century American Literature from New York University. He travelled through Latin and South America, studied pre-Columbian and Mexican mural painting at the University of Mexico, wrote about Brazilian Cinema Novo, and joined that circle of film makers, which included Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Tuten finally did live in Paris, where he taught film and literature at the University of Paris 8. He acted in a short film by Alain Resnais, co-wrote the cult film Possession, and conducted summer writing workshops with Paul Bowles in Tangiers.

He has written five novels - The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Tallien: A Brief Romance, Tintin in the New World, Van Gogh's Bad Café and The Green Hour - as well as one book of inter-related short stories, Self-Portraits: Fictions and essays. Tuten received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and was given the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Available products
Book Published 2019-03-05 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2019-03-05 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

So thrilling. It describes a specific period, but it also evokes the timeless fascination with the Romantic life. I also love how you treat the absolute lust for women, but women with charm, intellect and beauty. I don't think I've ever read a book so precise in presenting a young man's preoccupation and occupation. I love all the sex games and insecurities combined with the occasional triumph.

A remarkable and remarkably beautiful cultural record that is deeply personal, and a personal record that is deeply cultural.

This memoir is about more than what happens, though what happens is quite a lot. It's about a young man in search of a life, in search of himself. It's about love found and lost. It's about all of us. I love it.

The memoir got into my head in a very deep way, and for many nights I had dreams that it provoked. What the book seems to be about (and this is what made it so moving and disturbing) is the sadness of getting what you want. You (or "you") begin by wanting art and sex and you get more sex than you hoped for or imagined, but it leaves you just as lonely as you began. The chance to make art is something hinted at all along and the ending of the book is a wonderfully somersaulting marvel. The whole book is a full life story.

It's sensational. So clearly and movingly writtenits sentences so funny and quirky and matter-of-factly Steinian its tone as lucid as James Baldwin's (in "Notes") or Delmore Schwartz (in "In Dreams") or Willa Cather's or Jean Rhys's. A straightforward shaped American (or French-American) tone. (The best American writingsuch as yoursis mostly French in its leanness and succulence.) The feelings behind the words are so full and rich and (I daresay) pregnant with meaning, that the language therefore needs to do nothing fancy; it can simply be itself. A stylistic (and visionary) pinnacle.