What Is It All But Luminous

May 29, 2017
Garfunkel, half of the folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, loves singing, reading, performing, acting, walking, keeping lists, and his wife—as he writes in this meandering, sometimes incoherent memoir. Early on, Garfunkel pays tribute to his vocal talent: “These vocal chords... have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me.” As the narrative proceeds, Garfunkel wanders through his life, reflecting here and there on his complex relationship with Paul Simon; his love for and admiration of James Taylor; the suicide of his girlfriend Laurie Bird in the late 1970s; his walks across Japan, the U.S., and Europe; and his wife Kathryn Cermack’s breast-cancer diagnosis in 1996. Obsessed with lists, Garfunkel intersperses his rambling reflections with lists of the books he has read, songs on his iPod, and even 10 reasons why he’s in “awe of his wife.” Garfunkel seldom settles on one subject for long before he’s off to a related topic from his life. While Garfunkel reveals flashes of real insight about the transcendent power of music and the inner workings of a singer’s life, for the most part this slim volume feels tiresome.

July 15, 2017
The silky voiced singer looks back on his career and life.It would be hard to improve on the author's description of his younger self: "I live in my own rarified air. I put the 'e' in 'artist' every day." There have been few popular music memoirs with more literary references and less of a sense of self-deprecating humor. Though Garfunkel (Still Water: Prose Poems, 1989) knows that he is generally dismissed as the secondary partner to songwriter Paul Simon--"I was a 'BOUNCE, ' a sort of wall / and he of course had the ball"--this singular mixture of verse, doggerel, blog and diary entries, soul-baring confession, and lists of hundreds of books read is less about setting the record straight on Simon and Garfunkel than allowing readers to gaze into the poetic soul of an artist who variously sees himself as Don Quixote, James Joyce, Rimbaud, Odysseus, Whitman, and Prometheus. "I have these vocal cords. Two," he writes. "They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God's gift running through me." Simon may have written the songs, but Garfunkel had the voice, the hair, and the looks, and he got the girls. But all things must pass. "Does anyone notice the faint aroma of slowly decaying flesh?" he asks. "I'm depressed. All is vanity. Where is meaning?" Much of the book is about the joy he has found as a husband and a father, and some of it is about his acting career, which established him as a presence apart from Simon. "Before there was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there was Simon and Garfunkel--an extraordinary, a singular love affair," he writes, though the relationship is as ambivalent as it is symbiotic. Now, many decades on, "I am an old boatman / I cast my net of pretense before me / Then I sail into it." There are many voyages here, some flashes of vision, and plenty of pretense.

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