Albany Park - Hardcover

In the mid-1950s, Patricia and her best friend Beryl seek to escape the mundane repressiveness of suburban adolescence by hitchhiking across Spain. There they encounter a harsh economic system in which their youthful sexuality is a valuable commodity. Their picaresque opportunism is disrupted by Jose, a seductive figure who turns Beryl and Patricia into rivals and compells them to search elsewhere for the intimacy once afforded by their friendship. Patricia, renamed Patrice by Jose, invests her emotional life in a romantic fantasy that Jose defers consummating in reality; years later, his powerful hold is still evident. Novelist/playwright Chaplin's disinterested narration accounts for her 15-year-old self without condescending; her autobiography effectively reveals the cultural myths that shaped her life.Mollie Brodsky, English Dept., Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this obsessional autobiography, an English novelist portrays her destructive involvement with Jose, a Catalan she met when hitchhiking along the Costa Brava in the mid-1950s. Fleeing her mentally disturbed mother and unhappy South London childhood, the then 15-year-old Chaplin found enchantment and excitement with her poet-hotelier lover, but aside from one episode in Paris, failed to get him away from his domineering mother and his own obsession with Catalonia. Even after her marriage to Michael, a son of Charlie Chaplin, motherhood and her realization that Jose had exploited her as he did other women and men with whom he was sexually involved, she could not resist his magical charm. "He was a gift, an extraordinary delight in a life which had been quite often drab and low on delights."
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.