The Man Within My Head [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Pico Iyer (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 3, 2012

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

It may be that Iyer’s beautifully contoured sentences embody all the landscapes he’s absorbed as he’s traveled the world, pen in hand. Iyer is always present in his celebrated books (The Open Road, 2008), but never to the extent he is here in this captivating memoir of an unsought, often unnerving affinity. As he recounts indelible moments in his wandering, multicultural life and contemplates solitude and family, travel in “difficult and impoverished countries,” and passionate literary immersions, Iyer painstakingly maps his obsession with writer Graham Greene. Why has Greene “lived vividly” inside him? Iyer offers a unique perspective on Greene’s groundbreaking books and empathically renders Greene’s contrariness, prescience, covert compassion, and fascinating life. He concludes, “At heart, he offered me a way of looking at things, and the way one looked became a kind of theology.” Ultimately, Iyer’s profound inquiry leads him to a fresh elucidation of his feelings for his late philosopher father. Iyer’s deep-diving expedition also illuminates the mystery and spirit of the literary imperative: “A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the world.” --Donna Seaman

Review

“Resonates deeply…In the hands of a lesser writer, the dueling father figures would dissolve into melodrama, but Iyer weaves them brilliantly.” –Publishers Weekly   

“[Iyer] is a wonderful wordsmith, and he provides engaging stories.” –Kirkus
 
“It may be that Iyer’s beautifully contoured sentences embody all the landscapes he’s absorbed as he’s traveled the world, pen in hand. Iyer is always present in his celebrated books, but never to the extent he is here in this captivating memoir of an unsought, often unnerving affinity…Iyer’s deep-diving expedition also illuminates the mystery and spirit of the literary imperative: ‘A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the world.’” –Booklist
 
“A contemplative, idiosyncratic book, a kind of side trip that diverges from the routes of Iyer’s usual writing…as “The Man Within My Head” demonstrates, there’s fellowship to be found in the community of eloquent strangers, an eternal literary companionship.” –The New York Times Book Review
 
“A courageous, intriguing book, perhaps better described generically not as a memoir but a confession.” –The New York Review 

“As Iyer investigates Greene’s life, he finds more parallels with his own, some superficial and some profound, which Iyer susses out in his usual composed, flowing prose.” –The Daily Beast

“Iyer’s rich and provocative book invites us to see the world in which we find ourselves today in a new and revealing light, and that’s the real measure of his accomplishment. ‘A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the world,’ Iyer says of Greene, but he could be describing himself just as well.” –JewishJournal.com 

“[Iyer] is masterful at describing travel…a rewarding read.” –Livemint.com 
 
“This book is an original, a literary feat, a kind of counter-biography and shadow-autobiography. I can’t think of another quite like it...The Man Within My Head is Iyer’s richest, wisest book to date.” –The Hindu 

“Iyer writes admiringly and persuasively about Greene in ways that the novelist may have approved…an engrossing read.” –Commenweal Magazine 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (January 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780307267610
• ISBN-13: 978-0307267610
• ASIN: 030726761X
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #254,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > Travel > Specialty Travel > Literary & Religious

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisitely Written January 7, 2012

By L. Young VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Ostensibly "The Man Within My Head" is Iyer's meditation on Graham Greene, the writer nearest to his heart, but it is equally a meditation upon Iyer himself. Greene may be the man within his head, but why? What is it in us that makes a particular writer resonate in our souls? For Iyer Greene is his adopted father although the two never met.

"[T]here is a mystery, fundamental and unanswerable, in ourselves as in the world around us, which is in fact a part of what gives life its sense of hauntedness", Iyer writes. It is this sense of hauntedness that Greene captures in his novels and makes them meaningful to Iyer. Through Iyer's exquisite writing we learn here not only about Greene, but also about Iyer, a man who lives between cultures. We also learn about ourselves through his ruminations. What more could any reader ask?

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Men Within His Head April 15, 2012

By Taylor McNeil

Format:Hardcover

Pico Iyer's latest book is not exactly a memoir, not quite a literary biography--or an homage--to Graham Greene, and certainly not a book of travels. But it is, of course, something of all of those things, a hybrid creature that carries the reader along, thanks to Iyer's usual facile way with words. It is Iyer's most enjoyable book I've read, and not surprisingly, it's his most personal.

He opens the book during a visit to La Paz, Bolivia, and I can picture being back there myself, along the main streets with cholas selling M&Ms and lottery tickets, bowler hats perched on their heads. I picture a simple hotel room--and that's where Iyer is: sitting at a desk thinking about Graham Greene and writing, always writing or reading. When he was at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge in February 2012, Iyer said he had been working on this book for more than eight years, and had accumulated more than 2,700 pages in drafts: the words kept spilling out of him. (Happily, he trimmed it down to its current 238 pages.)

The man within his head is Graham Greene. Like Iyer, Greene was a bit too popular to be admitted into the literary establishment, and a man who was always an outsider, more by choice than anything else. Greene spent many years toward the end of his life in a small apartment in the Antibes, far smaller and almost hidden compared to his neighbor, Somerset Maugham, not too far a way in an impressive mansion. Iyer, too, willfully sets himself apart: he's lived for years in a small two-room apartment outside of Kyoto.

Iyer recounts his childhood: born to Indian parents, initially growing up in Oxford; a move to California in the 1960s, where his father teaches and accumulates acolytes; traditional boarding school back in England; always split between worlds.... Much like Graham Greene, who never quite felt at home anywhere, and whose characters had the same experience of, well, not exactly alienation, but a clear sense of being apart. Iyer returns often to Greene's The Quiet American, and its prescient understanding of how the British and Americans are swapping not just positions of dominance in the world but also those of certainty and doubt. Iyer travels to Vietnam, and we see how the types Greene writes about linger on still. (Readers would probably get more out of this book if they are familiar with the Greene originals; maybe it will inspire me to read him again.)

"A man within your head whispers his secrets and fears to you, and it can go right to your core," Iyer writes. For much of Iyer's life, that man is Greene, but he comes to realize there's another man he really barely knows who has also taken up residence in his head: his father, with whom he's never been very close. It's that old inheritance: we are our father's sons, even if we'd prefer to think that our literary heroes are our pole stars. In the book, Iyer slowly learns these lessons, and he tells the story with ease.

At the Harvard Book Store reading someone in the audience pointed out that while Iyer was slowly writing and rewriting this book over those eight years, he also wrote The Open Road, his book about the Dalai Lama. Iyer was amused and taken aback. He said he just realized that both those books' titles could be interchangeable: there are clearly many men within Iyer's head, and all are trying to point him in the direction of useful wisdom, useful for living one's life in this wide open world. Read more ›

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars His Own Head February 1, 2012

By kestrel

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I always enjoy Pico Iyers books because he has a balance of the objective, observing mind and the subjective self questioning of an attentive mind and the appreciation and acceptance of the heart mind. Or so it seems to me. He has closely observed information to share about people and places, and now he has closely examined things to share biographically as well. Along the way he always credits every helping hand or heart. I find strength in critiques that do not tear down.
Especially if you are also a reader of Graham Greene you will enjoy this book. If you have enjoyed Pico Iyer's other travels through the worlds his mind has encountered, you will get something out of this too.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Iyer and Greene December 1, 2012

By D. R. Ransdell

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This interesting introspective helps Iyer explain some of his background and the influences that hae gone into his writing. The "man within his head" is Graham Greene, an author who kept touching Iyer's life in odd ways. After reading this book I reread some Greene and watched him on film. I don't have the same reaction to this author--I'm happy to say he's not in my own head. But it's fascinating to see how an author who is as skilled as Iyer is able to trace some of the mysterious influences that have affected him and hence his writing. This is an unusually personal book. Even though Iyer's writing is always personal, this takes the reader to a new level. Although to an extent it's probably more enjoyable to Iyer or Greene connoisseurs, it's also a model for any reader or writer who is serious. We all have many, many influences on our own writing, but we don't always take the time to consider what those are. A careful analysis may even yield information we'd rather we didn't know. It's a risk we might have to take--and a risk that I appreciate Iyer's taking in this volume.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Man within My Head April 24, 2013

By Roman Anshin

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

What an exciting, thoughtful writer, who has lived such an adventuresome life--and continues to do so. From Santa Barbara, with an Indian academic father, to public school in England, to living in Japan, and traveling and writing-- A man of immense wisdom and thoughtfulness, he is a treasure , with his knowledge of Japan's "stillness", and his own extraordinary perceptiveness and thoughtfulness. A rare travel writer, who is a poet and philosopher of the first rank!This book was a treasure to read , mull over, and remember!!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for Graham Greene enthusiasts April 1, 2013

By Timothy J. Bazzett

Format:Paperback

THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD is the first book I've read by Pico Iyer, although I have been aware of his work for years, having run across his books in the travel section of stores. I learned of this book through an excerpt from it that ran in The New Yorker. It picqued my interest enough to order the book, mainly because I've been a reader of Graham Greene for probably 40 years - have read six or seven Greene books, perhaps, and some of them more than once.

I expected more of a memoir here than I got. The book's blurbs suggested it was much about Iyer and his father, who had been a much respected university professor and lecturer in California, after achieving notoriety for his brilliance even as a college student in India and England. But there's not really that much about the elder Iyer, or much more, really, about the author himself. Nevertheless this is an at times fascinating account of the importance of Graham Greene as a role model and an influence in Iyer's life. I would classify it as a literary anyalytic work on a very personal level, as Iyer managed to find many parallels between his own life and that of the much older Greene, who he never met. But his knowledge of Greene and his oeuvre is encyclopedic, enhanced as it has been by not just close readings of his books but also by by talks with many people who knew Greene and also with some of Greene's family members.

So while I was a bit disappointed in the book as a memoir, it did manage to reignite my interest in Greene and his many books. Although I've already read THE QUIET AMERICAN, now I kinda want to read it again, given the emphasis Iyer puts on that one particular book. Other Greene books I personally loved were THE POWER AND THE GLORY, THE HUMAN FACTOR and A BURNT-OUT CASE.... There are certainly plenty more Greene books to keep me busy for a long time and I may eventually get around to them. And who knows? I may take a look at Iyer's other books too. Recommended for Graham Greene enthusiasts. Three and a half stars.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER Read more ›