Germs: A Memoir of Childhood [Paperback]

A brilliant, sinuous exploration of family and childhood memory by one of the most original British philosophers of the twentieth century.

Germs is about first things, the seeds from which a life grows, as well as about the illnesses it incurs, the damage it sustains. Written at the end of his life by Richard Wollheim, one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century, the book is not the usual story of growing up and getting on but a brilliant recovery and evocation of childhood consciousness and unconsciousness, an eerily precise rendering of that primitive, formative world we all come from in which we do not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and things—houses, clothes, meals, parents—loom large around us, as indispensable as they are out of our control. Richard Wollheim’s remarkably original memoir is a disturbing, enthralling, dispassionate but also deeply personal depiction of a child standing, fascinated and fearful, on the threshold of individual life.“A frighteningly good memoir.” —Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books

“A great book, strange and beautifully written, candid yet ornate, as if Rousseau were being rewritten by Proust, with interpolations by another author familiar with Beckett. Wollheim’s spoilt childhood—eccentric parents, important visitors (Diaghilev, Kurt Weill, Serge Lifar), grand houses and grand hotels—was lonely and sad and strange enough, but immensely more interesting than most. . . . This is not a book to be admired for a season or a year, but to be counted among those masterpieces of which the fading memory continually demands return and refreshment.” —Frank Kermode

“In Wollheim’s hands the sentence—often half a page long, full of sinuous purplc%