Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir

Gore Vidal makes many fascinating points in POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION that I believe all can identify with on our journey to the grave. I bought the complete audio version of this book because I feel the emotion in Mr Vidal's voice, though he keeps it veiled in a professional, human warmth that listeners of audio books most appreciate. I admire him for speaking his mind whether others like it or not. His brilliance, experience and genius have long inspired my respect for him. The detailed death of his true love, after the great many years and experiences they shared, moved me not only to tears but to face the fact that there is no escaping the inevitable. I'm also reminded how young we remain within our bodies chained to time. Of all Gore Vidal's works, many of which I am a fan, this is the one that lets you in. If it is true that one can only respect others as much as one respects one's self, then I feel my self-respect has evolved through the experiences and deep insights shared by Gore Vidal in his points of navigation. He has stirred my emotions, stimulated my intellect, and awakened me through this profound book. I urge all to absorb the wisdom of a man who knows more about life -- not to mention the hidden side of those in power controlling life -- than any writer of our era. Apart from my standing ovation for POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION, I must admit to the sorrow I feel over our dilemma on this dying planet. I guess Mr Vidal really got under my skin with things he left unsaid because of being too sad to say. I wish we could all value each other as if we were a close family stuck on a sinking ship. I wish we could throw the gold overboard in favor of prolonging as many lives as possible. Another human in your arms must feel better than the loneliness of an award or riches. Through listening to Gore Vidal, I feel embraced by someone who knows. We're all in this together. Whatever faults we may find in others originate in our own mind and can be replaced with those better thoughts we have that make what's left of life worth living. Consider this review as another point in a navigation that involves each of us. Bravo, Gore Vidal!

Lovers of Vidal's wit and wisdom will feel as if they have been invited to dinner in Ravello or on Outpost Drive. Il maestro talks and occasionally repeats himself, as elders sometimes do, but the anecdotes you have heard before grow in repetition and expansion. This autobiography is not as carefully wrought as other of his books which deal with many of the same incidents, but there is a casual conversational tone here which is most endearing in someone as clever as Gore. As the shadows draw, we feel he no longer has to be smarter, sharper and wiser than his dinner companions. He simply needs to talk for the love of talking and for the pleasure talk brings to our company. In the great tradition of other authors, Dickens and Twain, Gore is a superb performer, playing all the roles. Who else knew Garbo, Jackie and Jack as he did, and who else can write about them without acrimony or sentimentality, capturing their voices and mannerisms. There is a fine line between gossip and art and Vidal crosses it with aplomb. He will be missed. Not only the end of an era but the end of friendship.

In this what Vidal calls his final memoir that loosely covers events in his life from 1964 to the present, a continuation of PALIMPSEST-- more or less-- he, in his words, navigates "so often with a compass made inoperable by weather." The memoir goes back and forth from Vidal's comments about his personal life to art to world events. If you get bogged down in trying to sort out all the marriages and divorces that make him somehow related to Jackie Kennedy, just keep reading for anon you'll know why he has little use for Jimmy Carter (he sent Carter a telegram after the aborted rescue attempt of the hostages in Iran asking him to resign) but admires Princess Margaret: "she was far too intelligent for her station in life."Vidal writes with candor and for the most part kindness about a great many people he has known: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Joan Didion, Truman Capote ("no fact ever gave him pause"), Tennessee Williams, Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fellini, Nureyev, Johnny Carson et al. He has not mellowed in old age-- he is now 81 and "waiting for diabetes to do its gaudy final thing"-- in his view of what is wrong with American politics. The grandson of a U. S. senator as well as a candidate for both the United States Congress and Senate, Vidal certainly speaks with knowledge and authority. He finds C-SPAN the only "exciting and useful American television" now available to the public as it "affords us the only living look we will ever have of a government that is more and more secretive and remote not to mention repressive."Vidal's account of the illness and death of Howard Auster, his partner ("as the politically correct call it") of 53 years is moving but without self-pity. The most difficult thing about grief is that those that remain have no one to talk to and "familiar rooms" are now empty. Emily Dickinson would describe the loneliness as that "awful leisure."As always, we are reminded that Mr. Vidal is a master of the English language. And certainly we have to revere someone who says that Barbara Bush looks like George Washington and will have his entire library of 8,000 books shipped from the Italian coast to California when he moves to the United States.

É uma especie de continuação do livro que comprei antes.

I have gained much pleasure from reading Gore Vidal over the years but this book brought me little joy. Firstly, I had hoped it would pick up from where his last his first memoir, Palimpsest, had left off. Instead, a great deal of his second memoir goes over the same stories that were told in the first memoir. It was like he had forgotten entirely what he had already told us.Secondly, Point to Point Navigation is incredibly unfocussed. It reads like the meanderings of a garrulous old man, which I suppose he may be by now. He wanders from one subject matter to another abruptly changing the direction of his topics and he throws all attempts of chronology out the window. There were a few snippets of gossip that were interesting but otherwise I would not recommend this to anybody but the most serious of Vidal students.

If ever your life feels a little thin or uneventful, blame Gore Vidal. He's had enough event and diversion in his time for five or six of us, and he keeps making us feel even worse by not only telling us about them in superbly written memoirs, but looking out of the cover at us all handsome and assured, both in youth and old age.First there was Palimpsest (1995), dealing with his early life, which Martin Amis called "a tremendous read, down and dirty from start to finish. It is also a proud and serious and truthful book." Now Vidal gives us Point to Point Navigation, subtitled A Memoir 1964 - 2006.And it is full of everything we have come to expect. Strange stories of all the great and good of the American twentieth century, from the very very famous to the known-in-certain-circles. Vidal's life has been not just more eventful than most, but lived at a more rarefied level; he was brought up among the renowned and the ruling classes, and so the line for him between the personal and the political has always been a thin one.Quote:"During the next quarter century I re-dreamed the Republic's history, which I have always regarded as a family affair. But what was I to do with characters that were - are - not only famous but even preposterous? When my mother was asked why, after three famous marriages, she did not try for a fourth, she observed, "My first husband had three balls. My second, two. My third, one. Even I know enough not to press my luck.""There, he is talking - initially - about his series of novels, Washington, D.C., Burr, 1876, Lincoln, Hollywood and The Golden Age, 'factional' accounts of the USA, which he refers to collectively as 'Narratives of Empire' but which his publishers keep insisting on branding as 'Narratives of a Golden Age.' Throughout Point to Point Navigation, Vidal is at pains to mention his fictional output at every opportunity, making a vain (in both senses) attempt to mark his patch in literary history as a novelist, rather than wit, essayist and polymath. But he can hardly be dissatisfied by how he is already remembered.And there is a good reason for his interest in remembrance, and how he will be viewed in retrospect. Vidal is now 81 years old, and the spectre of death shadows most of the book. There will not, we suspect, be a third volume. He is writing in "the awful year 2005," after his first full year spent without his partner of 53 years, Howard Auster, and making the move for health reasons back to LA and away from his beloved La Rondinaia, the extraordinary home on the cliffs of Ravello on the Amalfi coast in Italy, where he and Auster had lived since 1963.The memoir is less structured than Palimpsest, taking almost a diaristic form as he reflects both on the things that happen to him during 2005, the events in the world, and the people he knew whose deaths invoke a flurry of anecdotes. If the book had been more orderly, there is no doubt that Vidal would have left the strongest material to the end, instead of one-third in where it now appears. This is his report of the death of his partner Howard Auster in November 2003: the long struggle from illness to illness, the childlike reduction in his life, and most movingly, an extraordinary account of how Vidal looked into Auster's still-alert eyes after his heart stopped and held his gaze as he watched life ebb away from him. It is worth, as they say, the price of admission alone and if it doesn't move you to weeping then you should have your tear ducts checked by a qualified professional.So strong is the feeling of mortality throughout the book (assisted by the black cover) that it almost feels like a posthumous publication. Vidal is still vital however, and the effortless quality of his prose reminds us that although he is "moving, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked exit," he is still fully with us.And I do not want to suggest that the book is overwhelmingly gloomy or morbid. There is plenty of Vidal's wit in evidence, and his contempt for the current (and most past) American administration, and his country's cultural mores.Quote:"A current pejorative term is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meaning of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume."Despite the occasional stretches where he mistakes his intimate knowledge of some lesser-known folk with our interest in them, the overall feeling of gratitude and what Martin Amis called "a transfusion from above" when reading Point to Point Navigation, means I can offer it only the highest praise. It is a perfect vale for Vidal.

A melancholy end to Vidal's long writing career. A sequel of sorts to Palimpsest it is part autoboigraphy, part memoir with some wonderful chapters on his friendships with Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles amongst others, part gossip (a very funny piece about Barbara Cartland and a touching and revealing one about Princess Margaret), part state of the nation address and a valedictory correction to the many false myths and poor biographies about him.Most moving of all are the chapters about his 53 year relationship to his partner Howard Auster. It was so sad and revealing to read when Auster, about to go in for surgery and perhaps thinking that he might not recover from the procedure, asks Vidal to kiss him and they do. On the lips for the first time in 50 years. It says so much about the reticence of gay men of a certain age, their need for privacy, and the complexity of how to express oneself freely. Vidal describes Auster's later years with a stoicism befitting a great classicist.

Yet again Gore Vidal has written a master piece. The details about the very famous people has made so far are always described without 'showing off', simply as they are with the criticism they may deserver as well as their praize.Such a very rich life and yet accessible to us all. When asked his views about Obama just after the elections, his reply was simple and rather 'blaze', 'I have seen it all before', simple answer, black or white we know what the US Presidents can do! So does Vidal. He writes with an extreme witt even for very important situation in the world. I am not going to go on about it. His writing is made of perfect English and I will call him the 'sage voyeur' of the 20th century.In all his books I have found this enjoyment of reading in my taste a very wise man who has grown even wiser or is he becoming rather tired to see no progress in this world, maybe he shows in his last books shown some melancholy. Aren't we all???