An Interesting Life, So Far: Memoirs of Literary and Musical Peregrinations. Bruce King. Edition Noema, ibidem Verlag Stuttgart 2017 This extremely interesting book is like the author, larger than life, with a versatility of interests, emotions and hobbies. It is as much notation of professionals in the fields of literature, music (jazz) and multicultural cuisines, as it is an autobiography penned in the style of a formal diary. The chronology is evanescent of the 9 decades that hurtled past an age, beginning with the gift of a fast car by his mother when he was a teenager, so that he would ostensibly stay out of her way while she ran the family pharmacy in a town in New Jersey. This sense of small town boredom, and the ingenuity of a young man to whom erudition came easily led him to write many well recognized books on Shakespeare’s plays, Marvell’s poetry and Dryden’s plays, and consequently, immediate professional recognition as he straddled the continents. A secure life in Universities in America, however, was not to be. Bruce King became by the accident of his times, a teacher in the Common Wealth countries, in Africa, Caribbeans, New Zealand and India, escaping from each ideological net, when there was revolution or crises, by the skin of his teeth. His lovely wife Adele, to whom the book is dedicated accompanied him, but then settled to a teaching job in Muncie which allowed her a stable occupational life, and an income. Muncie, which was boring for Bruce, was where the sociological classic, well known to us, called Middletown was written by the Warners, and their team of research scientists. Bruce’s dismay with anything which is boring and rule bound runs through the 518 pages of the book. What would a bohemian intellectual who was pursued by global intellectuals for his standing power as a literary critic want with small town collegial politics? We have evidence from his striking descriptive prose about the eccentricities of academics, cosmopolitan or parochial. Sometimes his invective sounds foolhardy, and yet, no one has taken him to court for saying what he does, or maybe those described died of normal causes, boredom, or drug abuse or alcoholism. However, Adele’s love for Bruce, which was intensely reciprocal became the corner stone for writing the book. It is an autobiography which brims over with conjugal love, a shared sense of humour and the ability to match dancing steps perfectly. Anyone interested in the survival of Bohemia into the first quarter of the 21st century in America, Europe, Africa, Carribeans, Asia and Australia will find in this book startling escapades and a comic sense of what it means to struggle to be alive in the world of academia. Possibly, being Russian in genotypical terms, gives Bruce a sense of homecoming in Paris, with its aura of tragedy and aesthetic power, surveillance and elegant wit. Each vignette written by Bruce King carries with it a sense of the surreal and the absurd. The character assassination is perhaps the work of one who turns to the hara-kiri mode adroitly. He wants us to know him as he really is, and nothing is left unspoken. It seems like every thought that went through his head, and through Adele’s ears wafts back to us, starting from the 1930s, beginning with prenatal memories and reminders of his parents’ immigrant histories. What does it mean to be Jewish in a small town in America, and deny the significance of being bourgeoisie in America? It is the literature of a life of protest that appears to us here, where the lives of black musicians, the subterranean world of poets and writes in Deia, (where Robert Graves lived) near Mallorca, washes up in Goa, where the continuous need to thwart public opinion and enjoy the pleasures of intense hard work in free environments ties him to his desk. The questions he raises for us about bureaucracy, conformity, ambition (intellectual and personal) defy the rules of gravity. Bruce King shows us that where freedom is recognized, it is untrammelled and the dangers that follow are too horrible to imagine. This pendulum shift between freedom and conventions show us that the life of the mind can only be understood, in Bruce’s terms, by the continuous shadow place of humour that allows us to live. If this is taken away from us, there is nothing. His close friendship with Wole Soyinka often describes the way that revolution and incendiary moments follow in quick succession. His chapter on Derek Walcott gives us more than the sense of poetry, a frightening view of manners and distance as a way of creating walls between people. Bruce has brilliant pages on the Indian poets whom he often wrote about and seriously analysed, who became his friends. His lashing sarcasm of hypocrisy and venality in art worlds runs through the book. His descriptions of food, music, cars and dancing are the Barthesian preoccupations of culture studies. And Paris, where he continues to live, having celebrated his 89th Birthday on New Year’s day 2022, carries with it the resounding sense of its conversations, waterways, cafes, and of Adele’s and his daughter, who was an art dealer’s representative at a very young age. She died in a tragic housing fire, when Bruce was teaching in the district University, and he describes Adele’s and his loss in terms which we know to be ingrained in the hearts of mourners: a loss which can never be forgotten, or perhaps forgiven. Bruce King will always be remembered for the friends whom he made, and the honesty which accompanied his emotions, none of which are hidden. To write an autobiography in the latter years of Adele’s and his life, when they were holidaying in the summers in Hvar, (Croatia) and seeing the book come to light of day when he was in his mid 80s, is an achievement in itself. His promise of 600 pages of his Collected Essays in the near future, makes us feel that there is a purpose to being born. How to fulfill that purpose, in the presence of Fate, that is the biggest question that lies in front of each of us. Recovery from his daughter Nicole’s death, Adele’s death, and a decapitating cereberal stroke has given us this voluminous autobiography for which I feel grateful. Susan Visvanathan, CSSS/SSS JNU