Christmas round robins from a grumpy old man - For some years, the biographer Roger Lewis has been entertaining his friends with a letter at Christmas, in which he records details of the joys and frustrations of his life as it is actually lived. Here for the first time is a book-length version of this 'cult classic', a hilarious collection of diaries and memoirs - highlights of which include a trip up the Amazon River with countless ants and Maureen Lipman; his eldest son Tristan training to be a juggler at Zippos Circus ("Frankly, where did Magdalen College, Oxford, ever get me, eh?"); the mystery of the stolen kettle at Age Concern; the humiliation of not being invited to the premiere of his very own movie at Cannes; and the way the Dell call-centre people in Bombay keep thinking he's a woman...With his sharp eye for folly, his malice - and the unexpected shafts of humanity in spite of his chronic ill temper - Roger Lewis is the Evelyn Waugh of the 21st century. These addictive and paradoxically life-enhancing Seasonal Suicide Notes have the makings of a lasting comic masterpiece.
Seasonal Suicide Notes: My life as it is lived
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Roger Lewis is a genius writer, and he knows it." Lynn Barber "So funny - so wicked - so brilliantly observed. I salute him." Gyles Brandreth "He makes me cry with laughter - I really cried, blubbering and sniffling and gasping. Roger Lewis is a magnificently bilious comic genius." Francis Wheen "This is comedy of a rare quality. Lewis is a seriously funny man. The Sunday Express, October 4th, 2009 "Seasonal Suicide Notes is the most brilliantly funny and genuinely thought-provoking book of the year." --The Sunday Times, October 4th, 2009This is one of the funniest books you will ever read. And the most reckless. If you like black comedy you'll find yourself in Narnia." The Spectator, October, 2009 "If they ever award gold medals for comic genius Roger Lewis will be a shoo-in for gold." The Mail on Sunday, October 2009 "The perfect Christmas present is already on the shelves. It is the funniest, truest, most engaging thing I've read all year." Michael Gove, The Times, October 19th 2009 "These sulphurous round-robins are not just cry-makingly funny; there are also arresting insights into literature and life, with flashes of beautiful seriousness." --Daily Telegraph, October 24th, 2009 "Ironically, Roger Lewis's dyspeptic chronicle of a disenchanted soul is so sharply observant and deliriously funny that it makes you glad to be alive. One for every grumpy old man's Christmas stocking." The Daily Telegraph, November 2009
About the Author
Roger Lewis is the author of books about Laurence Olivier, Charles Hawtrey and Anthony Burgess. His international bestselling biography The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was adapted into a multi-award-winning film. Married to an educational psychologist and with three sons, Lewis divides his time between Herefordshire and Austria.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scabrously brilliant,
By Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Seasonal Suicide Notes (Hardcover)
I asked for this book in the Piccadilly branch of Waterstones, 'That's by Lewis Roger' said the pretty sales assistant. An apposite anecdote given the bile contained within this book. Lewis Roger is a grub street journalist trying to make a living when grub street has collapsed and instead of living in London schmoozing with literary types he is washed up in the 'Herefordshire Balkans'.
This short book is a seriously funny account of his life, his complaints, and his erstwhile desire for recognition. Following a much misunderstood, much maligned biography of Anthony Burgess (10 copies sold in the last year of counting), Lewis bewails just about every successful recent British writer/celeb. Delightfully in various ways, he lays into Clive James - a writer of 'mouldy fudge', Andrew Roberts (a baboon), Ned Sherrin, Simon Cowell, Julian Barnes (and his late wife Pat Kavanagh), Jeremy Clarkson, 'sad mother' Julie Myerson and best of all, Harold Pinter (obit) 'what a dreadful clanking beast he was'. Heaven knows how he got this past the libel lawyers. I for one am delighted he did. Interspersed with this literary bile are delightful snippets of his life as a marooned intellectual in the provinces. He cuts out articles from the local paper and offers snippets of local life: 'Age Concern has introduced a Toe Nail Cutting Scheme in the Community Centre run by "our trained volunteers", and tells filthy jokes picked up from Barry Cryer. Also in these diaries are laments at his health (he is fat and has fat person's ailments), his kids, his class (he was a butcher's son and feels the London establishment looks down on him accordingly), his lack of money, his envy at other people's money (such as Gyles Brandreth and the late Alan Coren) and his continual snubbing by his publisher's literary parties (which he doesn't want to attend anyway). Frustrated at being born in a time when the commercial imperative is everything in publishing (true, I used to work as one), and the weak collapse of the educated elites as they pump out more Jordan and Jamie Oliver, Lewis fancies himself as a contemporary, neglected version of his hero Anthony Burgess: a man of voracious intellectual appetites, though sadly without anyone to appreciate it. In the end, Suicide Notes is more like a contemporary Diary of a Nobody (extracted from in the epigram). Some people predict this book to become a cult classic and I certainly hope it does, as this book is one of the funniest I have read. I think Lewis is due a break, just so pretty Waterstone's assistants will know his name. I think he would like that.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Upper-middle-class bellyaching,
This review is from: Seasonal Suicide Notes (Paperback)
I got this thinking it would be like David Sedaris' brilliant "Santaland Diaries" and would be a good read for the airport/plane on holiday this year - well all I can say is thank god I brought other books with me! This was a real stinker for many reasons.
The book is divided up into years starting in 2004 and then every year is broken down into months where Lewis talks about what "hilarious" things happened to him in that month. Lewis talks about how his 1200 page autobiography of Peter Sellers was so much more complex than the film was (fair, given nobody would sit through a 20 hour film) but goes on and on about this for pages. He moans about how his work is underappreciated, how nobody likes him, how little his books sell, and how much he deserves fame and wealth for his book on Sellers and a similarly long and inaccessible book on Anthony Burgess. And that's what really gets me - the tone. It's this whiny, annoying whinge throughout about how he deserves fame for his work coupled with the sniping at colleagues and "the London literary clique" which he goes to great pains to stress he's not a part of. He goes on about how he's not invited to parties in London but when he is invited to The Times party he makes a point of saying that he stayed home and watched "The Bill". Then he's invited to a magazine party and he stays home to watch "Eastenders". And so on, etc. I think he wants the reader to think he's a cool outsider? It's a bit grasping given he complains yet again about how little he earns and deserves millions for his work. Would a literary outlaw be so tedious? The completely uninteresting and upper-middle-class worries (good school for the kids, money for expensive holidays), coupled with Lewis' repellent tone of bitterness make this a totally unfunny book for anyone unless you come from a similar socio-economic background. Really disappointing but I'd hate for anyone to be stuck with this for a holiday read given there are much better books out there. The other books I took with me which I highly recommend are "War" by Sebastian Junger, "The Ghost" by Robert Harris, and "Hearts in Atlantis" by Stephen King. I ended up leaving this in the sick bag on the plane, where it belongs.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Antidote,
By Badger (New York) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Seasonal Suicide Notes (Hardcover)
Absolutely brilliant antidote to conventional wisdom, political correctness and false cheer. Worth buying if only to read his
skewering of Pinter. Spot on.
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