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—Bookreporter
"It's hard to imagine any single word that would accurately describe this book . . . an entertaining volume that's more fun to read than a conventional memoir might have been."
—The Wall Street Journal
"A charming book of prose and poetry printed in a digitalized version of his handwriting . . . witty, candid, and wildly imaginative . . . A highly intelligent man trying to make sense of his extraordinary life."
—Associated Press
From the golden-haired, curly-headed half of Simon & Garfunkel, a memoir (of sorts)—moving, lyrical impressions, interspersed throughout a narrative, punctuated by poetry, musings, lists of resonant books loved and admired, revealing a life and the making of a musician, that show us, as well, the evolution of a man, a portrait of a life-long friendship and of a collaboration that became the most successful singing duo in the roiling age that embraced, and was defined by, their pathfinding folk-rock music.
In What Is It All but Luminous, Art Garfunkel writes about growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s (son of a traveling salesman, listening as his father played Enrico Caruso records), a middle-class Jewish boy, living in a redbrick semi-attached house on Jewel Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens.
He writes of meeting Paul Simon, the kid who made Art laugh (they met at their graduation play, Alice in Wonderland; Paul was the White Rabbit; Art, the Cheshire Cat). Of their being twelve at the birth of rock’n’roll (“it was rhythm and blues. It was black. I was captured and so was Paul”), of a demo of their song, Hey Schoolgirl for seven dollars and the actual record (with Paul’s father on bass) going to #40 on the charts.
He writes about their becoming Simon & Garfunkel, ruling the pop charts from the age of sixteen, about not being a natural performer but more a thinker, an underground man.
He writes of the hit songs; touring; about being an actor working with directors Mike Nichols (“the greatest of them all”), about choosing music over a PhD in mathematics.
And he writes about his long-unfolding split with Paul, and how and why it evolved, and after; learning to perform on his own . . . and about being a husband, a father and much more.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 26, 2017 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780385352468
- File size: 48263 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780385352468
- File size: 36255 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 29, 2017
Garfunkel, half of the folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, loves singing, reading, performing, acting, walking, keeping lists, and his wife—as he writes in this meandering, sometimes incoherent memoir. Early on, Garfunkel pays tribute to his vocal talent: “These vocal chords... have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.” As the narrative proceeds, Garfunkel wanders through his life, reflecting here and there on his complex relationship with Paul Simon; his love for and admiration of James Taylor; the suicide of his girlfriend Laurie Bird in the late 1970s; his walks across Japan, the U.S., and Europe; and his wife Kathryn Cermack’s breast-cancer diagnosis in 1996. Obsessed with lists, Garfunkel intersperses his rambling reflections with lists of the books he has read, songs on his iPod, and even 10 reasons why he’s in “awe of his wife.” Garfunkel seldom settles on one subject for long before he’s off to a related topic from his life. While Garfunkel reveals flashes of real insight about the transcendent power of music and the inner workings of a singer’s life, for the most part this slim volume feels tiresome. -
July 15, 2017
The silky voiced singer looks back on his career and life.It would be hard to improve on the author's description of his younger self: "I live in my own rarified air. I put the 'e' in 'artist' every day." There have been few popular music memoirs with more literary references and less of a sense of self-deprecating humor. Though Garfunkel (Still Water: Prose Poems, 1989) knows that he is generally dismissed as the secondary partner to songwriter Paul Simon--"I was a 'BOUNCE, ' a sort of wall / and he of course had the ball"--this singular mixture of verse, doggerel, blog and diary entries, soul-baring confession, and lists of hundreds of books read is less about setting the record straight on Simon and Garfunkel than allowing readers to gaze into the poetic soul of an artist who variously sees himself as Don Quixote, James Joyce, Rimbaud, Odysseus, Whitman, and Prometheus. "I have these vocal cords. Two," he writes. "They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God's gift running through me." Simon may have written the songs, but Garfunkel had the voice, the hair, and the looks, and he got the girls. But all things must pass. "Does anyone notice the faint aroma of slowly decaying flesh?" he asks. "I'm depressed. All is vanity. Where is meaning?" Much of the book is about the joy he has found as a husband and a father, and some of it is about his acting career, which established him as a presence apart from Simon. "Before there was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there was Simon and Garfunkel--an extraordinary, a singular love affair," he writes, though the relationship is as ambivalent as it is symbiotic. Now, many decades on, "I am an old boatman / I cast my net of pretense before me / Then I sail into it." There are many voyages here, some flashes of vision, and plenty of pretense.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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