Reviews

Bambi and Me

S. K. Page

The invaluable Sheila Fischman, whose translations have become a kind of national treasure, has brought us another book by Michel Tremblay: Bambi and Me (Talonbooks) is a small memoir of Tremblay's earliest movie-going days in Montreal in the fifties. Recounted here is much of the Tremblay family life and more of such masterworks as Cinderella, The King and I and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It's a book to set you remembering your first movies.

Tremblay's first movie was The Mighty Joe Brown, which he saw when he was five or six, and which precipitated what he describes as "one of the most intense, violent moments" of his life, when the gorilla enters the bedroom and stands over the sleeping woman; at this point the young Tremblay began to scream. We know that movies mark us, especially when we are young, and this book reminds of those marks.

This is a book for dipping into, for the bathroom if not the coffee table, padded out with a novella written when the author was sixteen.

Tags
No items found.

SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU

Reviews
Jonathan Heggen

A Thoughtful Possession

Review of "The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories" edited and translated by Jay Rubin.

Reviews
Michael Hayward

Sitting Ducks

Review of "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" by Kate Beaton.

Columns
Stephen Henighan

Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.