Native State
A Memoir
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- ¥2,000
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
A captivating, deeply affecting memoir chronicling a journey from a Hollywood childhood as the son of a fading show business figure to a bohemian life in Europe and back to his native state of California, where the author must face the man who had driven him away.
Summoned from abroad to attend to the ninety-four-year-old father he’s never been close to, writer and musician Tony Cohan finds himself reliving his own peripatetic life—a kaleidoscopic odyssey from California’s sunny postwar promise through the burnt end of the 1960s to the final days of the last century.
An engrossing investigation of memory and identity, love and desire, art and fate, Native State vividly portrays the author’s attempts to escape the confines of a celebrity-filled, alcoholic family through music, writing, and travel. His descent into the colorful milieus of musical and literary geniuses and lowlifes, divas and crooks, fortune tellers and culture gods in Paris, Tangier, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, San Francisco, Kyoto, and Los Angeles coalesces into a distinctive, intimate depiction of a pivotal cultural era. Throughout, Cohan brilliantly interweaves and contrasts his past experiences with his present-day reflections on the universal youthful desire to flee home and family, and the simultaneous “undertow of origins” urging a return. The result is a work that combines unusually rich storytelling with extraordinary literary quality.
Poignant, elegantly crafted, and often funny, Native State is an indelible portrait of the artist as a young man, and—as son and dying father grope toward acceptance—a coming-to-terms with self, family, origins, and the elusive American idea of home.
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Cohan (On Mexican Time) was about to begin another travel book when he got word that his 94-year-old father was in his "ninth inning." Reluctantly, Cohan went to California for the death vigil. He'd never particularly liked his father, Phil, who at his career height had produced and directed the Jimmy Durante Show for CBS Radio, and who had monopolized the family spotlight relentlessly. Poring over the family scrapbooks, his dad's "memory palace," Tony relived his California boyhood, remembering his first drums, his first girlfriend, his mother's alcoholic binges, his father's interminable name-dropping and self-aggrandizing, and his own escape, after college, to Europe in the early 1960s. A bebop and cool jazz drummer, young Cohan played with some of the great expatriate musicians, including Dexter Gordon and Bud Powell. He knew Paul Bowles in Tangiers, met William Burroughs in Paris and took a lot of drugs. Returning to California, he soon took off for a Zen-inspired stint in Japan, but made it back to the States in time to get into the Ravi Shankar inspired Indian music craze, the Big Sur scene, the Haight's "summer of love" and even some sessions with Jim Morrison. Cohan intercuts his own story, chapter by chapter, with updates on his father, who's finally "entering a state of grace." Filled with "improbable affection" for the dying man, Cohan finds "the less of him there is, the easier it is to like him." While Cohan's disarmingly honest life story would be colorful enough on its own, his memoir is enriched by his setting it against the story of his coming to terms with his father.
