Antonia Quirke: Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers

The beautiful strangers are the actors that Antonia Quirkes cinematographic obsession focuses on. Ever since her childhood she's loved films, and actors especially. This is a very frank autobiography, and I would have liked it more had I known her from Eve. She's quite a clever, rambling writer, so it wasn't a bad read, but I don't know who she is. And I googled her, but there's not an awful lot out there.She's some sort of film critic, but that's all in the book so I knew that. She's married to Jonathan Marr, whom I should also know about, apparently. But I don't. He's in the book too, of course, vyeing for Antonia's attention with her handsome actor loves.

Bits of this book are very funny indeed, bits would be funnier if I knew who she was going on about, bits are just okay, bits are actually moving. I got it from my editor friend E, who got it via work and made the probably wise decision not to get it translated. It's not translatable, because we don't know who Antonia Quirke is, and there isn't much else of tremendous interest in the book. Although after having read it I can say she sounds rather nice, if a bit scatterbrained.

If anybody wants to borrow it let me know. There was more I was going to say about it, it's not crap so merits more than this scant post, but by now it's been a while and I've forgotten the goodest parts so to speak. I can say that if she could write about something more universal, it could turn out great.