Phone Home Berlin
By Nigel Cox
Victoria University Press, $35
I don't know if Nigel Cox's publisher meant this to happen, but this collection of his non-fiction writing has given me a strong desire to read his other books. His novels, like Tarzan Presley and Skylark Lounge, areknown to have a mythical side to them, and for this reason they have never appealed. But now, with an excellent insight into the man and the author, I really want to see what his fiction is like.
Phone Home Berlin is an accumulation of writing: from a journal, an essay, short stories, short pieces and poems, and by the end, you have a pretty complete portrait of this funny, human, family man and author.
Cox packed a lot into his 55 years, before dying of cancer in 2006. We hear about his boyhood reading and a life-changing stint in California in the early 1960s, which was to have big impact on his writing career. A journal giving his reactions to life in modern day Berlin, and the job of opening a Jewish Museum to a tight deadline, are pivitol points in the book. Cox's frank reports give insights into the German psyche
Cox's publisher Fergus Barrowman describes it as a pretty full autobiography. He's absolutely right.
