A review by tom_f
Minu elulugu by Charlie Chaplin

4.0

Capsule review, with maybe some more thoughts later: as an honest account of one of the 20th Century’s most remarkable lives, and most essential artists, this is obviously fascinating, but Chaplin’s eloquence and confident geniality ensure that it is also broadly very good company. I was grateful to hear so much about his straitened upbringing in London, and in such vivid epistemic and imaginative detail. The pleasures of the book do begin to thin in inverse proportion to Chaplin’s fame, principally because he is also quite devoted to cataloguing all his various celebrity encounters (naturally his power, influence and various scandals and eventual exile are engrossing). While it’s certainly passingly interesting to get a coherent collage of snapshots of Churchill, Gandhi, Picasso, Sartre, Einstein, Eisenstein, Nehru, HG Wells, Orson Welles, GB Shaw, Zhou En-lai, Khrushchev, H Hoover, FDR, James Agee, Hart Crane, Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky, Schoenberg and many others (these just off the dome) this feels paradoxically much more like a solipsistic enterprise than all the colourful first-person narrative. Even a cursory read of Chaplin’s wikipedia entry (for the uninitiated) will illustrate just how remarkable this guy’s life was, even without an appreciation for his art (which is still excellent entertainment and very enriching, as a corpus). The book is both essential history and good fun, with more than an occasional touch of poignance and an enduring love of life and people.