Customer Reviews

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman may be peculiar to those who have forgotten that bizarre landscape of wide-eyed, hormone-driven adolesence through which we all passed, but to this reader the rites of passage facing the 14 year old have rarely been so candidly captured. Thomas Penman has strange behaviors, but as his creator Robinson relates them, they all serve as seeds to explain with great wit and empathy the results of Thomas' coming of age. This is a wonderful little book that reads rapidly (as in difficult to put it down), entertains us with outrageous situations, then ties a series of clues to the Everyman question of Who Am I and How Did I Get Here? into a deeply touching finale. These characters are unforgetable - everyone of them from the main character, his best friend Maurice, the Vicar Potts, the psychic Olanda, the radiantly drawn Gwendolin, and of course Walter his Grandfather. A wonderful excursion and addition to the READ THIS List for teenagers. Suggestion: Don't let the language in the first chapter throw you off course: it is there for a reason!

I was wandering through Blackwell's Books in Oxford the summer of 1998. These pie-shaped eyes were glaring at me as I walked past the stacks of new arrivals. One look at "Thomas" and I had to read it. While I was in Oxford studying WWII, I found myself rushing through school work so I could immerse my last waking hours reading of Thomas' adventures. Usually my loud guffaws were met by enquiring roommates at the door dying to know why I was dying of hysteria. When I arrived home from England, I promptly suggested that several of my male friends read this. They found Thomas to be a very cool kid. Its crude and rude, but it is also sweet and tender. Enjoy...

Bruce Robinson's mastery of descriptive language was so delicious I found myself reading whole paragraphs aloud, to no one in particular, just to hear the words. Selections should be publicly read on Mr. Robinson's birthday by the best British voices available.

While reading this book, I would occasionally look up and wonder what on earth I was doing in the subway, in a restaurant or wherever I was, so completely enveloping was the mood evoked in the story as it unfolded. Eventually, I was sorry the book ended, mostly because Mr. Robinson hasn't another novel out to immediately dive into. To those of you who feel the same, I recommend a reading of the script of "Withnail and I", which is online.

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman is an elegantly written book which deserves praise. This book remind me of Mahfouz's "Palace Walk" and Kamal's childhood though in a complete different setting. What really amazed me is the details of the childhood experiences that the author has put through - we all can identify ourselves with Thomas since we all have gone through some of the same experiences. Through out the book we find the deep undercurrent of love between Thomas and his grandfather. Both Thomas and his grandfather are not the model charatcers that every parent want their kids to look up to still they have their own charm which attracts the best looking girl to Thomas.
I wish Bruce Robinson (the author) was a little bit more mature but still there is no denying of the fact that this is a fantastic book. The language is sometimes a little offensive but again that is part of childhood.

Writers with ambitions and pretentions should avoid this book: it will instantly humble and perhaps shame you. Your manuscript will be relegated to the bottom most drawer never to be scanned again. Robinson's sense of language is out of the Lawrence Sterne school of masterful logomachy. The humour alone will produce spasms in remote and special places; scatology has never been as well served. Thomas Penman, however, is EveryKid and his thoughts, desires, and deeds are illuminated by Robinson in a manner reminiscent of a coal fire on a blazing grate. Shadows and sudden lucidities inform the book and the room.

I was wholly "taken" with this book and the construct of the grandfather is brilliant. Religion, fortune telling, village life, sodden schools, shaky marriages, even the elements are handled with exquisite care in words and phrases you writhe to have thought never mind written.

I think it is impossible to overpraise this text; anyone with an ear for language will exult in Robinson's accomplishment. There are academics who could [will] spend the next three decades deconstructing this text for a career.

What I need to do is begin a re-reading, and now!

I have read many coming-of-age novels, but never have I seen one that combines so elegantly the awkwardness of growing up with the complete obliviousness of this awkwardness by the rest of the world. Thomas will be a character that will stick with me for a long time to come.

The narration is a great balance of discussion and description. Not a single word was wasted. Take some time out of your busy schedule to read this book. Not a single minute will be wasted.

Don't be fooled by the curious cover and the blurb on this book. The real message Robinson puts across is of love, in all of it's greek meanings. The book is about wonderful love but is tinged with tragedy. It also covers areas such as pornography and dubious bowel control, and does so highly amusingly and integrates these subjects into the whole mystery.

This is for anyone who loved Adrian Mole and Catcher/Rye.

A very inventively told story of an adolescent boy's preoccupations and his struggle to interpret the people around him. He's an awkward kid with an even more awkward life. Appropriately, the author takes narration and description directly from this off-beat adolescent's brain and lays it on the page without organizing it first, leaving the reader to decipher meaning from the same confused state as the main character.

The hard-hitting style of Bruce Robinson kept me reading whether I wanted to or not. Sentences came along like punches in the stomach. Not altogether pleasant but not often boring. The oft mentioned sex, pornography, and excretory habits may be objectionable to some but I would counter that it is difficult to tell a story as interestingly as this if all you are willing to talk about is gardening and the weather.

In all, I found this to be an interesting story told in a refreshingly vivid and visceral manner. I would look forward to another book by this author.

I've read a half dozen reviews of The Peculiar Memories and expected a laugh-out-loud rollicking, absurdist farce of a novel. And parts of the book do indeed live up to the advanced billing, particularly some of the early "soiling" scenes. But, as another reader has noted, a transformation takes place midway through, and instead of an eccentric, socially inept, pornography- and munitions- obsessed adolescent, Thomas metamorphoses into a successful lover and a refined and emotionally balanced individual. This is not nearly as much fun. I found the love affair with Gwen to be fairy-tale implausible and somewhat cloyingly portrayed, and few of the other characters emerge as fully formed persons. The ending is appropriately downbeat and Thomas prepares to move on with his life, but by then the damage has been done and the story begins to wear thin. Though well written and certainly not a waste of time, The Peculiar Memories doesn't remain true to Thomas as we first encounter him.

This is the wonderfully comic and touching story of an adolescent coming to adulthood and terms with the hypocrisy of the adult role models that make up his world. We meet the protagonist of the title as a thirteen year old acutely contending in math class with lingering scatological difficulties - and briefly the recounting of how he deals with an unwelcome addition to his undershorts gave this reader pause - what, exactly am I in for here? But in short order you warm to the child, his innocence and sense of wonder - he's interested in poetry, antiques and a female classmate - his misadventures, he confuses "enema" and "anemia," so universal and ably described in Robinson's jagged prose that leaves you laughing out loud when, two sentences after the fact, you realize what he has just said. But for some wonderful friends - an experienced fellow student who relieves him of his virginity and his grandfather, mysterious in his utterances after a head wound in the Great War ( his time lying among the battlefield dead described in a beautifully limpid passage) he might have wandered off into adult bitterness. For, as we discover, he has every right to his scatological difficulties - parents whose biologic and emotional ties to him are more than just suspect and his best friend betraying him at every turn so too does he have allies in the child's never ending battle against adult hypocrisies. For in a wonderful turn at the end of the story the dead speak and history is righted. As I passed this book off to a friend I envied him for the fun he was about to experience. And you too.