The invaluable Sheila Fischman, whose translations have become a kind of national treasure, has brought us another book by Michel Tremblay: Bambi and Me (Talonbooks) is a small memoir of Tremblay's earliest movie-going days in Montreal in the fifties. Recounted here is much of the Tremblay family life and more of such masterworks as Cinderella, The King and I and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It's a book to set you remembering your first movies.
Tremblay's first movie was The Mighty Joe Brown, which he saw when he was five or six, and which precipitated what he describes as "one of the most intense, violent moments" of his life, when the gorilla enters the bedroom and stands over the sleeping woman; at this point the young Tremblay began to scream. We know that movies mark us, especially when we are young, and this book reminds of those marks.
This is a book for dipping into, for the bathroom if not the coffee table, padded out with a novella written when the author was sixteen.