AN ORDERLY MAN

 

9 colour and 19  black & white photographs

Author – Dirk Bogarde

Publisher – Chatto & Windus, Year 1983, pages 291

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Excerpts :

(1) The bespectacled gentleman with his box of dyes was summoned. Eagerly he scattered his phial over my future carp-pond, triumphantly he cries, viola! As it marbled from red to odious yellow, anxiously he inquired if I had at any time taken this water to my lips. Head bowed, I admitted that I had. We clambered up the muddy bank together and he hurried off with more phials of dye and rods and poles while I swallowed a quarter of a glass of neat brandy. Two hours later he found the leak with the triumph and awe of Lord Carnarvon at the tomb of Tutankhamen.

(2) For countless days, it seemed, we sailed up and down a frozen lake in Upper Austria in blizzards, chased about for endless nights in the very bowels of Schwechat Airport or stood freezing to death in melting snow among mournful black fir trees, desperate for the arrival o tea-urns and something hot to eat. When the tea arrived it was usually stone-cold. The sight of a pile of cold, boiled spaghetti on a sagging paper plate, a plastic cup of cooling milkless coffee on the upper deck of a listing lake-steamer in a biting wind is engraved on my mind for eternity.

(3) Ten months after my father’s death, on her own in the house for the first time while Elizabeth and George were lunching locally with friends, my mother drank the contents of every bottle on the drink-table, plus a crate of Light Ale, replaced all the stoppers neatly, and plunged headlong down the staircase which led to her bedroom, breaking almost every bone in her body; except her neck.

At the hospital they regretted that it would take forty-eight hours to “dry” her out before they could operate.

The shock, which we had all expected, had finally struck her; and her purgatory began.

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My Take : This book is a partial autobiography by Bogarde, of the years when he bought an old house in rural France, to live in after retirement. How he turned the ramshackle house to livable conditions and had to do few films again to shore up dwindling finances.

          The book apart from giving you an insight of how sections of the film industry work; gives you glimpses of living in a small area of France.

          Told in a friendly and joyful way while owning up his mistakes. Overall an interesting  book.

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Subject Type - Reminiscences

Narrative Style – Excellent

Readability – Excellent

Maintaining Readers Interest – Excellent

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