A Double Life: ‘Gripping’ - Erin Kelly

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I enjoyed this in a squirmy sort of way because Claire is so off-the-rails OBSESSED.....but I also completely understood why and could empathize. The ending was not my fave, but overall, I found this to be a pretty decent light thriller. Not up to “Under the Harrow,” but a good sophomore effort. Heylin, like an unfortunate number of folks who write about Dylan, is a pompous, arrogant ass. He spends way too much time putting down other biographers. He seems to think we might care about what others got wrong but he has surely gotten right. Damn, man just get it right, and don’t mention Scaduto, Spitz, or Shelton. He also spends way too much space on Dylan’s random drivel in the form of his bad stream of conscious writing that became Tarantula and liner notes to 60s albums and in the incoherent interviews he gave on the tours in ‘65 and ‘66. Claire grew up having to shoulder the knowledge that her father may have been a killer. She hasn't seen or heard from him since she was a child. Is he on the run because he was guilty? Or is he hiding until he can prove his innocence! The story is told in alternative sections between the two women and the author does not reveal the tenuous link between the two of them until quite near the end. Now maybe it was me but I kind of got the impression that Mr Heylin started to drown in all these archives, especially the drafts upon drafts of early versions of lyrics which we are continually being told are located in the Tulsa Museum of Bobness or were sold at Sotheby’s for two million dollars. The last chapters are stuffed with this horrible melange of half-thoughts and unlyrical scraps. Look! Here is a fragment that is the missing link between Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues and Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window… pardon me for not being gripped. And while Mr Heylin was entranced by all these previously ungoggled-at details he seems to miss framing some of the more dramatic moments in a familiar can’t see the trees for the wood problem that besets those too close to their material.

A Double Life by Flynn Berry | Goodreads

I did prefer this family-focused plot to the spy angle of the previous book, but it was still slow, and I had difficulty getting into it. This is not an espionage novel at all but is being sold as one, it is more like domestic noir - a genre that tends to bore me. Author and publisher cashing in on the famous relative which is understandable but this book doesn't deliver what it promises and is poorly executed. Does she really know anything about espionage? Claire is in her early thirties and hasn’t seen her father in twenty-six years. He may still be out there in the world and she can’t rest easy knowing this. He disappeared after her mother’s attempted murder: one in which he is the prime suspect. He plead his innocence through his friend’s whom would be investigated for helping him escape: they denied everything and were never charged. Claire asks herself these questions more often than not: Do his friends know where he is? Did her dad really try to kill her mother or was her mother mistaken? Was her dad more of the man his friends painted him to be or what her mother accused? A Double Life tells the parallel stories of two women, Isobel, a journalist, and Gabriela, who works for the Foreign Office. It started off promisingly but then unravelled rapidly. And yet the marriages Eliot depicted most strikingly in her novels were nightmares of coercion and control – as if she were trying to warn women against leaping into folly. Janet Dempster is battered and thrown into the street barefoot by her drunken husband in Scenes of Clerical Life. In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke, seeking intellectual communion with a like-minded spouse, winds up jealously circumscribed, thwarted and exploited by Casaubon, her pompous husk of a husband.I don’t know whether to call our life a fairytale or horror story,” Maria writes at one point. If Resin is a fairytale, it vies with the darkest imaginings of the Brothers Grimm. A Double Life is a dull tale about Claire, a doctor and traumatized woman still struggling with the violence her father inflicted on her family over two decades ago.

Book Bob Dylan Biographer Clinton Heylin: Interview on New Book

What he can’t remember is that Dylan didn’t write “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” when he landed. He wrote it three days later. And in the interim, he recorded most of the album. He wrote “Sad Eyed Lady” because he’d run out of songs he intended to record, not because he’d arrive from Richmond and went, “Shit, I don’t have any songs.” Even at the time, he tweaked it. The story is told by the POV of the daughter—Claire—who is obsessed with finding her father. She is now a doctor, leading a quiet life in London. Her younger brother Robbie is a mess, with an addiction to pain meds. They’ve both changed their names so their past can remain hidden. Yeah. There’s a blues thing that Dylan goes into in the middle of the “Mixed-Up Confusion” session. And there’s an instrumental in the “The Times They Are a-Changin'” session, but Dylan gives it a title. It’s a proper instrumental, not a jam. Because they weren’t logged on the studio logs, they were missed. Claire Alden es la protagonista principal de esta novela. No he podido conectar con ella y creo que eso me ha perjudicado a la hora de leer. Entiendo que lo que le ocurrió marca la vida de cualquiera, pero las decisiones que toma siendo adulta no me gustan demasiado. No conocemos demasiado a los personajes, ya que algunos aparecen solo para su actuación puntual y luego nos quedamos con las ganas de saber más de ellos. Just what the world needs, another Bob Dylan biography. How many are there already? 17? 18? But this one has a pretty good excuse for existing. The author is far and away the most reseachingest, most obsessive-fan-accurate Dylan biographer there ever was. Clinton Heylin has already written ten books on Dylan including a giant biography from 2011 which this now replaces. In the last ten years mountains of Dylan archives have been made available and Mr Heylin has mountaineered the whole lot, so this is the Last Word. Until the next Last Word.This novel is based on the disappearance of Lord Lucan. However, although it is inspired by a real-life event, the characters are fictional and events are told from the point of view of Claire, a thirty four year old doctor in London. Claire started life with another name, and another life, until her father fled the country.