Customer Reviews

A Postcard Memoir

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Anyone who has ever sent a postcard will be stunned and enthralled by this fascinating collection, which also includes his own intriguing inner dialogue. As a postcard connoisseur, I can only say, this man understands what it's all about!

Sutin has great ideas for books. I've now read four of his books, and finished all but this one because the topics were so good -- Buddhism in America, biographies of Aliester Crowley and Philip Dick, and this one, the postcard memoir, should have been a terrific book and I can't really see why it's not, except in all this time i've never warmed to Sutin as a writer, and can't quite figure out why.

This is a great book to get just because it's a great idea for a book, realized pretty well. Searching for one's lost family in the pile of crap that mounts up at the feet of the angel of History is another version of Dick's I-Ching driven narratives, or other books written with the Tarot or the Ouija board as coauthor. Whether you regard this as purely a chance operation or an embrace of synchronicity will have a lot to do with the outcome. I guess I wish Sutin had gotten more into the game of the thing than he did, but he had a memoir to get off his chest, and a family story, and kids of Holocaust survivors are always lugging that extra ton of inherited survivor guilt and whatnot: it makes them difficult, as friends. I have the same difficulties with Sebald. If you like Rings of Saturn, i'm pretty sure you'll like Sutin's memoir.

Most people witll find this small caveat pointless, and will enjoy this book for its multiple virtues. Highly recommended.

I can't believe Lawrence Sutin has written another book - and this one is even better than the last two. What a fascinating way to structure the story of his life - by using favorite postcards that inspire memories of days gone by. I loved his book about Phillip K Dick - and the one he wrote with his parents, about their Holocaust experiences, is must-read stuff. But this one is the best yet - by turns fanciful, touching and downright funny. Bravo!

I loved this book for a couple reasons. First of all, Lawrence Sutin is a great writer - one of those guys that probably very few have ever heard of outside his home turf, which is primarily the twin cities. But the guy's been around, worked various jobs, got educated and read some of the great thinkers and thinks a few pretty deep thoughts of his own as he ponders things like reincarnation, the Dalai Lama, and the unexplainable mysteries of life. But I probably enjoyed most the short vignettes about his youth and young manhood wherein he speaks of baseball, dogs, friendships and the like. Best of all perhaps are his sometimes mirth-making meditations on fatherhood and step-fathering which he came to at a relatively late stage, in his thirties. For example, on his relationship with his two young stepdaughters he comments, "In matters of parenting, I try to imitate their mother. They've come to listen to me a little. I fart a lot and they think that's funny." Not quite what you'd expect from a guy who, not too many pages before, talked of "reading Evans-Wentz's translation from the Tibetan of the LIFE OF MILAREPA, the ascetic poet, illumined one of the Himalayas." So of course I laughed out loud. Because most guys never quite outgrow laughing at farts, perhaps not even the "illumined one."

And of course there are all these odd, cool old picture postcards on nearly every other page of the book, artifacts that acted as catalysts to Sutin's memories. Sutin confesses to being a compulsive collector of these cards.

The other reason I absolutely loved this book was for its physical beauty. Yeah, I'm a booklover, and books like this one make me nearly weak in the knees, with it's heavy glossy pages and its French fold cover, all beautifully designed by Jeanne Lee. While A POSTCARD MEMOIR is technically, I suppose, a paperback, it has all of the beauty and appeal of a very expensive coffee table book. I loved holding this book, feeling its weight and perfect smoothness. It was a tactile, voluptuous adventure for a true booklover like me. It's also a perfect example of why the whole idea of e-books makes me sad. Bookmaking can be an art, and A POSTCARD MEMOIR is a perfect example of that art. I loved Mr. Sutin's sly, funny wise memoir. But, nearly as much, I loved the way Graywolf Press put it all together. Bravo! - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER

If you've never read a memoir before, or you have but found it boring, you are in for a pleasant surprise.

Sutin creates short (usually one page) vignettes of his life, alternating these with some of the most unique postcards you'll ever see. If you think memoir means boring autobiography, you'll rethink that after reading this book. Not only will this book give you insight into Sutin's life, but you may just be able to see yours more clearly too.

Using the visual medium of postcards coupled with creativity and philosophy and memoir of Lawrence Sutin's words gives this work life, punch and texture. It's a great work to spur your own creativity - and to satisfy the voyeuristic urge in all of us. I wish there were more truly original pieces of literature like this.

Larry has an interesting life problem -- he's the son of Holocaust survivors. His mom and dad met behind enemy lines in Poland, hiding from the Nazis -- a remarkable story he details in his tribute to their experience, Jack and Rochelle. He reveres and loves his parents, but their experience has had the effect of throwing his life into a sort of unheroic (by comparison) shadow.

Yet he has soldiered on. Larry is a gnostic by nature. By this I mean to say that Larry is, as near as I can tell, very brilliant, with a special knack for tackling arcane topics.

He wrote a celebrated analysis of speculative fiction writer Philip K. Dick a decade ago , and has followed that up with something even more Byzantine, a full-fledged biography of Aleister Crowley (Do What Thou Wilt, A Life of Aleister Crowley.

But in the meantime, he took time to create a perfectly wonderful mini-autobiography called A Postcard Memoir. It is a series of portraits from his life, thumbnails of people who have touched him, along with a few philosophical observations. The "gimmick" or hook that these 400-word wonders hang on is that each is accompanied by an antique picture postcard, which Graywolf Press has lovingly reproduced.

It is a gimmick which works smashingly. First, it is a natural one -- Larry collects postcards, and uses favorite cards as reverie objects, staring into them until the faces and places he doesn't know and hasn't visited spur a personal association inside him. A postcard labeled "Smartly Dressed Young Man" depicts "a young man of angular but easy good looks, earnestness and wit, [and] a taste for faintly wicked pranks." The picture bears an eerie resemblance to Larry's friend Bob, who can be charged with those same defects.

So Larry's essay describes his friendship with Bob, how they met as young writers (though "his subject matter was the borderlines of clarity and mine the chasm of chaos") concluding with the realization that "the best friends of my life were people who would let me be in their company and somewhat copy them."

In one essaylet after another, Sutin is unstintingly honest about what he takes to be his own defects -- an obscurity of thought, a painful bashfulness, and a feeling of not being quite right for this world -- feelings alien to all but himself.

I have only scratched the surface of his concerns. He writes about his parents, lost loves, his beloved children, his wife Mab, who from these writings appears to have been FedExed to Larry overnight from heaven, about jobs and opportunities, places that are real, and places that exist only in dreams.

It is a book of tremendous intimacy because we get to look at Larry's life in all its pimply everydayness -- but it is magical, too, because the pictures are so beautiful, and transport us into our own unspoken memoirs. It's a wonderful gift from a talented writer.