Recapitulations

In what he so thrillingly reveals to be the echo-chamber of autobiographical self-invention--a vertiginous terrain of memory, reflection, inescapable figuration--Vincent Crapanzano creates a uniquely compelling sequence of immediate experience and profound insight into how we each construct the story of our lives. A lifetime of anthropological as well as literary interpretation by one of our most subtle interpreters of human expression and behavior here turns upon Crapanzano himself, in the telling of his own story. In so doing, he gives us a vivid speculative adventure, part detective story, part Augustinian-Sartrean meditation, always hovering between origins and ends, the known and the unknowable. Skeptical, alluring, wrenching, exhilarating, always riveting, Recapitulations is a tour de force--a genuinely philosophical investigation of a remarkable life, which also teaches us how to seize that freedom distilled by every profound encounter both with others, and with that paradoxical other we call the self. --Peter Sacks, Harvard Univeristy With Recapitulations, the anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano has not only written a moving, ambitious, and compelling memoir; he has forged a new genre. Call it the meta-memoir. A brilliant storyteller, he asks himself--and us--what it means to tell, to listen, to remember, to share, to probe the imagined truths of recollection. This is a profoundly original book, and may well change the way you think about your own recapitulations. --Wednesday Martin, Ph.D., author of Stepmonster and Primates of Park Avenue Vincent Crapanzano is not only a thoughtful man who writes eloquently about his rich and adventurous life, but he is also a worldly emissary who advises us never to take for granted our own vision of the world: there is much to learn from people we do not understand and who do not understand us. --Gay Talese, author of A Writer's Life and other books Vincent Crapanzano's astonishing memoir, Recapitulations, is the most fascinating and intelligent book I've read in a long time. A true marvel! --Louis Begley, author most recently of Memories of a Marriage Praise for Waiting: The Whites of South Africa What Mr. Crapanzano has to say about the state of white South Africa, when he writes as interpreter and commentator, is so interesting, [and] so insightful into the processes of self-deception, yet without loss of human warmth. --J.M. Coetzee, New York Times