My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel by Luis Bunuel and Abigail IsraelRead about the other entries on the list.
I've long loved this strange, slanted little book for its offhand genius and excellent gossip. But I used it to prop up a wobbly table in Calcutta in 2003 and haven't seen it since. It's been reissued, and I'm happy to find it as remarkable as I recall. Like any surrealist masterpiece, it's playful, subversive and (frequently) baffling.
Devoted to protecting the "essential mystery in all things," Bunuel doesn't excavate the past or take us behind the scenes of Belle de Jour (a pity). It's not information he cares for, or veracity, but wisdom and beauty; not memories but the act of remembering. Scenes come to us highly aestheticized. In one early memory, Bunuel walks with his father in an olive grove. They come across a strong, very sweet odor, and then the bloated body of a dead donkey. Around the carcass, vultures staggered, too full to fly.
He's a confident, discursive writer eager to riff on what he loves ("vast damp forests wreathed in fog," "little tools like pliers," firearms) and loathes (crowds, Borges, newspapers). He recounts meeting Hitchcock, collaborating with Dali, mourning Federico Garcia Lorca, attempting an orgy with Charlie Chaplin. He settles scores and spills his friends' secrets shamelessly. On the topic of Dali's sexual proclivities he tells us that the painter was fond of seducing American heiresses, but being almost entirely asexual, "those seductions usually entailed stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the women's shoulders, and, without a word, showing them to the door."
--Marshal Zeringue
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