Niche

Starred review from April 27, 2020
A pop semistar reminisces in the voices of great writers in this dazzlingly off-beat memoir. Momus, aka Nick Currie, a Scotsman who chose the name of the Greek god of mockery as his stage name, recalls life as an art-pop singer-songwriter and novelist (The Book of Jokes) celebrated for dark-edged, satirical lyrics; muttered vocals; and incongruously peppy beats. His narrative is a music industry picaresque, complete with grungy tours and art-school groupies, that falls gloriously short of superstardom. It’s also an inventive homage, presented as commentaries on Momus’s adventures in the personas and styles of dozens of writers, artists, directors and scientists. Thus, “James Joyce” probes Momus’s budding artistic sensibility, “Hemingway” recounts his experiences in Manhattan on 9/11, “Freud” analyzes his sexual fetishes (parading around naked), and “Alexander Graham Bell” also analyzes his sexual fetishes (obscene phone calls). Momus delivers spot-on impersonations—“ stared up at... the Gothic shard surrounded by glum stalactites of deadened hedge and the beetle-infested trunks of damp trees, its southern aspect confronting an endless hell of rugby pitches,” writes “Poe” of a sinister boarding school—with plenty of self-deprecating wit. (“For some reason, nobody wants to buy a concept album which mashes up the Red Brigades with The Sound of Music,” grouses British singer-songwriter “Viv Stanshall.”) This is that rare show-biz memoir that’s both entertaining and a literary triumph.

May 1, 2020
When in doubt, let David Bowie narrate your autobiography. "It's a strange world wherever you are." So says Graham Greene as filtered through Momus, the pseudonym of Scottish pop musician Nicholas Currie. Born in 1960, Momus has been writing and making music for decades, yet he isn't particularly well known except perhaps among fans of Vampire Weekend. It's fitting, therefore, that he put writers and musicians better known than he to work in telling his life story. "Dead writers are unemployed," he writes at the beginning. "It's a shame, because they could be put to better use than rotting and being forgotten." Benjamin Spock, the guiding light of the parents of boomers everywhere, turns up early to assure readers that because "children given autonomy will tend to become adult of their own accord," his mother did just right to allow N--so he's addressed throughout, akin to a certain literary K--to push the books in the bookshelves around as he crawled. Sigmund Freud shows up to validate an early expression of carnal interest while hard-boiled detective novelist Mickey Spillane is on hand to deliver a few nicely cynical lines about the nature of life. Some of the "pastiches" are less effective than others. For example, a longish contribution attributed to Ernest Hemingway doesn't sound in the least bit Hemingway-esque as it recounts what it was like to be in New York on 9/11. Some are overstuffed, as when Karl Kraus, the Viennese satirist, delivers a soliloquy that draws in the biologist Ernst Haeckel, DSL technology, the iPhone, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Lord Haw-Haw, among others. Still, the appearance by David Bowie, N's "lodestar, the single most decisive influence on his life," is lovely, and it will make those who share the author's love for him miss Bowie all the more as "life goes on in its innocent, incorrigible way." Altogether a grand entertainment, effortlessly blending pop culture and high culture.

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June 1, 2020

Scottish polymath Momus (aka Nick Currie) sets himself the daunting task of telling his life story through the lens of short excerpts in the style of a host of writers, artists, and assorted figures ranging from Euripides to Sigmund Freud to David Bowie. He has an uncanny ear for the cadence of a particular author, whether it is Ogden Nash's lyrical rhymes or Niccol� Machiavelli's somber admonitions to rulers, and he helpfully introduces more obscure personalities to the reader. Starting with his birth in 1960, Momus devotes a chapter to each decade as he traverses the globe with his parents and siblings, attends a variety of schools, and establishes himself in London with a succession of mundane jobs while finding his way as a bandmate and songwriter. Although it is sometimes challenging to locate actual events within each selection (capital N's help), the writing is so delightfully witty and truly captures the essence of its tribute that this is of little import. VERDICT Showing a prodigious awareness of the sweep of centuries of culture, this is an admirable conceit finely executed. It will have great appeal to anyone interested in new modes of autobiography as well as Anglophiles and devotees of Momus's musical, literary, and artistic talents.--Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2020
Nick Currie, aka Momus, is an avant-garde singer, songwriter, and blogger, and as quirky as they come, as is his delightful and goofy memoir. Upending the format of a traditional memoir, he offers a mock oral history of his life allegedly recounted by 217 deceased authors and artists of various types from various eras. His journey begins in Paisley, Scotland; the biographers of the first decade of his life range from Dylan Thomas and Robert Louis Stevenson to Mickey Spillane and Franz Kafka. Some of his contributors wonder why they're even in the book. This is a nobody, and we are somebodies, asserts Norman Mailer. Sure, he's alive and we're dead, but what does that have to do with anything? His biographers describe his life through their own mindset, but they also talk about themselves and reference their own work; thus, George Orwell maintains that Nick is living under a totalitarian state, while Virginia Woolf emphasizes the importance of a room of one's own, something he does not have at his boarding school. Other incongruous representatives of the deceased include Henry Darger, Lou Reed, Mary Tyler Moore, Roland Barthes, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Bertolt Brecht, and David Bowie. Eccentric, ridiculous, brilliant, and great fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)