By my rough count there are just over eleven thousand words in Memories Look at Me (New Directions), a slim, shirt-pocket-sized volume described as a “lyrical autobiography about growing up in Sweden,” written by the late Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish poet and recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. A more accurate description might be “notes toward an autobiography,” since the eight fragmentary chapters only take us up to 1946, when Tranströmer was fifteen years old. Chief among the boyhood fascinations that helped to inform his later life was a love for museums—the Natural History Museum in particular—and Tranströmer describes his own insect collection, inspired by the museum’s displays and housed in the family’s summerhouse: “jam jars with dead insects and a display board for butterflies. And lingering everywhere: the smell of ethyl acetate, a smell I carried with me since I always had a tin of this insect killer in my pocket.” Not surprisingly, Tranströmer grew up a solitary boy, “acutely aware of the danger of being regarded as an outsider because at heart I suspected I was one. I was absorbed in interests that no normal boy had.” Perhaps this is the temperament, and these the conditions, that help to form a great poet. What we have here is lovely, but I wanted more; lyrical or not, eleven thousand words are insufficient to tell Tranströmer’s life, or to properly illuminate his world view. The late Harry Crews also wrote a memoir of his boyhood, recently republished by Penguin Classics. A Childhood is Crews’s vivid account of his family’s hardscrabble life in rural Georgia during the Depression. It was a world so grim, so circumscribed, that “when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it;” at times you wonder that Crews survived to adulthood. “It was a hard time in that land, and a lot of men did things for which they were ashamed and suffered for the rest of their lives.” —Liam Macphail

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