Mark Twain’s Big Book

"Mark Twain’s autobiography — Volume 1 — released in mid-November, is an enormous hit, apparently much to the surprise of its publisher, the University of California Press. Bookstores across the country and online retailers sold out almost immediately, never mind that it’s a work of sobering scholarship and more than 700 pages of very small print.The reasons aren’t hard to find. One is good postmortem advertising. Twain wanted his autobiography published a century after his death in 1910 so he could say just what he pleased. “Unexpurgated” is what you hear about this book, as if Twain were dictating from his cot in the afterlife, full of brimstone and wrath. This is also a scholarly work — the “authoritative” edition. As sales pitches go, it’s hard to beat “authoritative” and “unexpurgated” together.

In fact, there’s really nothing sulfurous about this book. Mark Twain is terrific company, plain and simple. He knew everyone, went everywhere, seemed to be interested in everything and is capable of making the reader — in 2010 — laugh on nearly every page. And this is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography. It’s an autobiographical miscellany, a collection of Twain’s many attempts to write about his extraordinary life.

The system he finally found for doing so is perfect. Twain talks about what he’s interested in until he’s no longer interested in it, and then he talks about something else, wandering at “free will all over your life.

This is a book for dipping, not plunging. Read, as Twain might put it, until interest pales, and then jump. It feels like a form of time travel. One moment you’re on horseback in the Hawaiian islands — or recovering from saddle boils with a cigar in your mouth — and the next moment you’re meeting the Viennese maid he called, in a private joke, “Wuthering Heights.” We can hardly wait for Volume 2."
via NYTimes.com