The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer

The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer

We all carry other people inside our heads - actors, leaders, writers, people from 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 writer Graham Greene: he examines Greene's obsessions, his life on the road, 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 they have in common: a typical old-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, however, 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 at 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 cultural explorers gives us his most personal and revelatory book yet, and one of the best new portraits of Greene himself.

***** He has written the work that those who love Greene (as I do) have dreamt of writing and, in doing it so well, absolved us of the need.. Humbling and moving ... The Man Within My Head is one of a handful of magical books that I have read straight through * Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph *
A virtuoso memoir ... A moving tribute to his real-life father concludes this triple memoire of three men mysteriously united by mutual obsessions and magically conjured by Iyer's power of imaginative analysis * Iain Finlayson, The Times *
A personal and passionate book ... Captivating and intelligent ... An eloquent and intelligent investigation into fathers and sons. It is a book that contains travel anecdotes, personal memoirs, literary criticism and, yes, biography and autobiography. And yet the result is none of the above, being instead one of those hard to categorise books that publishers resist, booksellers puzzle over but readers will surely love * Observer *
One of the unanticipated benefits of British rule in India is the body of distinguished writing in the English language coming from the Indian diaspora - Naipaul, Seth, Rushdie, Mistry, Mishra and Pico Iyer ... a global author * Spectator *
Exceptionally elegant and eloquent * New Statesman *
It is not only compellingly readable, but as telling about Greene as any biography yet published * Maggie Fergusson, Economist *
Vividly unusual memoir ... generous, thoughtful, without ego the book I wish I'd written ... Achieves a truly hard task, to make the writer's mediation become the reader's * Independent *
Through Greene's writing, Iyer accesses Greene himself, delivering to us a thoughtful and exquisitely rendered portrait of him * Guardian *
What at first seems a literary stratagem, an elegant framework for an affectionate but clear-eyed consideration of Graham Greene, proves to be something else, something rather more profound ... Moving ... at once memoir and meditation ... Iyer is brilliant in invoking out-of-the-way places in a few spare but telling strokes, as well as the wayward and forlorn figures who populate them - in this he is very much Greene's disciple * Times Literary Supplement *
Iyer is good on Greene's ambivalence towards faith and its relation to his own darkness ... He's good too on Greene's strange prissiness * John Preston, Sunday Telegraph *
In this elegantly elusive memoir, the text between the lines dares to explore the terrible simplicities of faith, love, compassion, trust that Greene's flawed characters constantly seek - and sometimes even find * Prospect *
Pico Iyer delights, weaving with scintillating intelligence and evident fondness a spell-binding tale of the 14th Dalai Lama's uncanny power on the world stage. The Open Road intertwines an insider's access to telling detail with a well-seasoned journalist's skeptical sensibility. This thoughtful, thought-provoking book will open readers' eyes. I couldn't put it down * Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence *