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Ebook341 pages4 hours
Jackdaw Cake: An Autobiography
By Norman Lewis
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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About this ebook
With dry, laconic wit, Norman Lewis remembers his transformation from stammering Welsh schoolboy to worldy wise, multilingual sergeant in the Intelligence Corps, on the cusp of becoming a writer. With a calm, observant gaze from the start, the young Norman moves from Spiritualist parents in Enfield to live with supremely dotty aunts in Carmarthen, whose baking of a weekly cake to feed the jackdaws gives the book its title. Escaping his eccentric family by marrying the daughter of a Sicilian associate of the Mafia, Norman made a living as a wedding photographer and by dealing in cameras, while restoring and racing Bugattis for pleasure. Here we see his first journeys in Spain, Cuba and the Yemen and a wartime spent in Algeria, Sicily and Italy, all of which acted as an apprenticeship for his career as one of the twentieth century's greatest travel writers.
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Author
Norman Lewis
Norman Lewis is the author of thirteen novels and thirteen works of non-fiction, including Voices of the Old Sea, Golden Earth, and A Goddess in the Stones. He lives in Essex, England.
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Reviews for Jackdaw Cake
Rating: 4.2222219999999995 out of 5 stars
4/5
9 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Picked this up in a charity shop. A wonderful, if partial, auto-biography, of the authors' life from infancy to the immediate post-war period, when he would have been about forty two , or thereabouts. The first of Lewis' work I have read. It was expanded into a later, longer autobiog. published under a different title, I understand. Full of unexpected nuggets. There is something terrific about reading the erudite autobiography of a man you knew nothing about; it's something of a mystery tour. Rather struck by the description of Edwardian Llanstephan: "There was no more beautiful, wilder or stranger place in the British Isles."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I picked this up almost at random, and realised after a couple of chapters that I'd made a silly mistake and confused Norman Lewis with another celebrated (but very different) travel writer, Norman Douglas. But by that time I was so intrigued and amused by the story of the three eccentric Welsh aunts that I carried on reading anyway...Lewis's technique as a writer seems to be to focus on the oddnesses in the people around him, much as Evelyn Waugh does, but he has a sympathetic way of bringing these out in the text that leaves his subjects with much more of their self-respect and human dignity intact. There are obvious overlaps with the subject-matter of Waugh, Powell and Greene (they all belonged to roughly the same generation, of course), and sometimes you feel that Lewis, writing in 1985, may have borrowed a bit from his predecessors (the captain and sergeant-major in Lewis's field security unit certainly made me think of Waugh's Hound and Ludovic, for instance). But Lewis has a very engaging quality of his own, and having at last discovered him, I certainly want to read some more of his books.