Publisher's Synopsis
Having dropped out of the Sorbonne - "because my French wasn't up to it then, and besides I reallly thought that schools weren't the place for me at all" - Lawrence hitchikes to Rome where he contacts Olimpio's friend Prince Borghese who it is hoped will help him find work in a luxury hotel "on the strength of my languages". But the Prince has other fish to fry and Lawrence wearies of Rome. Joan comes from Paris, and wants a guided tour of Italy, which takes them as far as the far tip of Sicily where Lawrence hopes to find a fishing village where the people will give him sardines and bread in exchange for teaching English to the "bambini"... Soon they are sailing from Naples back to the USA, where our hero tries his hand as a school teacher and ticket counter clerk at Idlewild Airport, from which last he is fired for kissing his new love the "Panamanian voodoo doll" behind a billboard. He soon follows Joan to San Francisco where he sleeps on her couch in North Beach and takes several jobs - busboy, dishwasher, book clerk and even orange picker to raise enough money to sail to Rio - on a Japanese freighter full of peasants bound for the farms of Sao Paulo - so that he can join Jonathon, his linguist friend on a grant in Rio de Janeiro. At least in his longed-for Brazil, Lawrence draws the baroque churches and learns to dance the samba in dance halls near the harbour, where he meets his first "brasileira". She takes him to a macumba on a hilltop where, in the midst of a chanting assembly, he is horrified to see her struck down by a "saint" or spirit and roll wildly on the ground. One night he hears the drums of a samba band and, making friends with one of the players, follows them up into the favela where a long-long friendship is born between him and the boy's sister, her husband and all their children...Lawrence Bohme's whimsically told but scrupulously faithful "personal history" of his first 41 years is entitled My Very Long Youth because "due to a force beyond my control I only started growing up, or calming down, after that age". His erratic wanderings throughout the Western World, in the four decades following the war in the midst of which Lawrence was born, have been enough "without wasting a single word" to fill sixteen "novel-length" parts or "books" which explore the scope of his wanderlust and his insatiable curiosity for humankind in general "and women in particular". The eclectic author - "a half-European, half-American child of the second half of the 20th century" - describes his opus as simultaneously "a retrospective diary, an eye-witness history book, an idiosyncratic collection of drawings and photographs, a one-way, slow-motion travel guide, a movie made up of stills and, to put it politely, a partially contrite confession of compulsive concupiscence"...
