READING from point to point

POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION

By Gore Vidal

Illustrated. 277 pages. Doubleday. $26.

And it is wonderful to read someone who is still writing in our (as it indeed CAN be) wonderfully mellifluous and malleable and musical language!
It is also wonderful to note that the New York Times, who long denied him any mention of his books, has granted Vidal (deservedly) two rave reviews, excerpts and links follow.

Books Of The Times 'Point to Point Navigation'
Wry Luminary Upstages Stars

By JANET MASLIN
Published: November 24, 2006

As a memoir (his second, after “Palimpsest”), “Point to Point Navigation” is as meandering as its title indicates. That’s a compliment: it takes an adroit raconteur to skip so entertainingly among seemingly unrelated subjects without losing track of each anecdote’s destination.

[...]

In the end he is his own best advertisement, with a lifetime’s worth of stinging observations and sharp, combative insights to his credit. Add vanity, hubris and audacity on the same scale, and you have a man whose new memoir is unmissable. Surely he would be the first to agree.

Sunday Book Review

Leave-Taking

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Published: November 26, 2006

TO describe this collection of fragments as a valediction would apparently be in accordance with the author's wishes. Nearly every page is heavy — I almost said "gravid"—with intimations of mortality . It's closing time at the Vidal villa in Ravello, Italy, where (as Noel Coward once said about his own bedroom), "let's face it, quite a lot has happened over the years." The books and pictures are being crated up, and farewells tendered to the locals. On a neglected hook hangs a faded bathrobe , somehow preserving the outline of the late Howard Auster , companion for over half a century . "I now move, graciously, I hope," Vidal writes in his opening line, "toward the door marked Exit."

---- ONE CAN ONLY HOPE THAT GORE VIDAL REMAINS WITH US FOR MANY PAGES OF WORDS MORE ! THERE ARE ONLY SO FEW LEFT WHO CAN SPEAK IN ANY LANGUAGE, EVEN FEWER IN ENGLISH.