Defeating Expectations

I suppose when I started reading Dreams From My Father I had quite a few ideas regarding the experience in store for me. I expected it was going to be a good read, for example, and in that respect it has not let me down, so far. But in almost every other way it has turned out to be rather different from what I thought it would be.

It's the portrait, rather self-portrait, of the author that has surprised me most of all. Dreams From My Father is no advertisement for myself in the grand Mailer tradition. Well, that's not entirely true. It has Mailer's coruscating honesty, but is missing the attendant self-confidence. Obama emerges as a bit of a mess in places. I'm a third of the way through and so far the tone is positively downbeat - except for the frequent sense of the mystery and poetry of others. In fact, that's exactly the word used in this bit: There was poetry as well - a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask.

It's difficult to imagine Bush writing this. It's difficult to imagine any politician doing so - with Havel as an honourable exception.