I like 'Stuff'
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I really like this book. It's not, as Martin Rowson says, 'an I spy book of personal trauma'for which there is currently a ghoulish appetite; it is a generous, tender and funny musing on growing up, coming to terms with life and loss and playing the hand you're dealt.
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Wade through nostalgia for the 70s
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I'm not sure quite what I think about this book. It has moments of brilliance, with real insight; moments of charm, where you revel in waves of recognition; and some parts of really poor writing, which grate enormously.
The premise of the book is that Martin Rowson has written it while sifting through the junk, treasures and general accumulation of a lifetimes objects in his father's home, shortly after the death of his father and stepmother.
In his case, there is rather more to sift through and a rather more eclectic collection than most, because his father was an inveterate hoarder.
As he comes across things, they trigger recollections. In many ways, this attachment to objects, to the things a loved one has left behind after they die, is normal. They take on a totemic quality, because they are all that is left, which is probably why so many families squabble so bitterly and futilely over wills.
I loved the idea of this book, but somehow, like Rowson's own sister, I found it left me unexpectedly cold. There is a detachment, a measured air to his disclosure, which is distancing.
There is not the openness there is in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, for example. However, there is an eye for detail, particularly period detail, which ill appeal to lovers of retro TV programmes, and fans of Nicolson Baker.
The book absolutely held me, despite the fact that I did not warm to Rowson, which is why it gets 4 stars. It was an interesting approach to a study of grief, and an accurate documentation of a particular time and place.
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