Prince Harry ''Spare'' (Audio Book): Summary and Commentary
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| listen to it here: https://amzn.to/3yFj4xF |
“Spare” is the autobiography of Prince Harry, actually written by Pulitzer Prize winner J. R. Moehringer, former ghostwriter of “Open”, Agassi's autobiography.
Harry's narration begins from the day of the death of his mother, Lady Diana, chased by the paparazzi until the car accident in Paris, and ends with the death of Queen Elizabeth, in the epilogue.
Over the course of the book, Harry retraces his childhood and adolescence, then his military service and finally his love story with his wife, the actress Meghan Markle, and their departure from the palace; particular emphasis is given to his troubled relationship with his brother William (“Willy”, the heir to the throne) and his father Charles, as well as the relationship between the English monarchy and the press.
Since its release, the book has achieved record sales, becoming Britain's best-selling non-fiction book.
I'll start by saying that the book is very well written, it is surprisingly smooth and engaging, and despite its size it can be read very quickly.
SUMMARY
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, is not one to learn from books, as his new memoir, “Spare,” reminds readers. Yet its pages are full of literary references, from John Steinbeck (“He held him tight,” writes the admired prince of “Of Mice and Men”) to William Faulkner, whose verse from “Requiem for a Nun” he discovers on BrainyQuote.com ” on the fact that the past is never dead, nor even past; to Wordsworth and other poets. Shakespeare's "Hamlet," however, hit a little too close to home. “Lonely prince, haunted by dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent's usurper…?” Harry writes. "No thank you".
He prefers to sink into TV comedies like “Family Guy,” where he admires Stewie, the disturbingly mature child, and “Friends,” where he identifies with the troubled Chandler Bing. Reading “Spare”, however, makes you want to snatch the remote control from his hands and stick a copy of “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller inside. Not because of Harry's military exploits (unlike Yossarian, he seems to have felt sane only in combat), but because of the seemingly inescapable paradox of his situation.
The prince, vociferously renouncing fame and royalty with all its punitive invasions of privacy, has only become more famous, if not more regal, trading his proximity to the throne for the No. 1 seat on the overstuffed seats opposite Oprah and Anderson Cooper. With “Harry & Meghan,” the Netflix series that precedes the book, he and the Duchess may be overexposed. (Maybe this is part of the grand plan, to drive away her curious minds by boring them to death.)
My interest in the English royal family tends to wane after the era of previous defeatists, such as Edward and Wallis, and the dynamic and dysfunctional Princess Margaret, who “could kill a houseplant with a single frown,” Harry writes. They weren't very close; Margaret once gave him a cheap pen wrapped in a rubber fish for Christmas.
I devoured the first episodes of “The Crown”, but the fifth season, focused on the marital problems of Charles and Diana, left me with a delicate yawn. Image The cover of Prince Harry's memoir, “Spare,” is a close-up photo of his face. His red beard is trimmed and he wears a gray t-shirt and a necklace. Credit…
However, I expected to like “Spare,” as it was written with the help of talented author J.R. Moehringer, whose memoir, “The Tender Bar,” I adored before it was even a glimmer in Ben Affleck's eye, and who helped tennis star Andre Agassi's autobiography, “Open,” transcend the locker room . And I did it. Partly.
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A period of worrying health news: Charles's diagnosis came after Catherine, Princess of Wales, spent almost two weeks in hospital after undergoing abdominal surgery, and while Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, said she had been diagnosed with melanoma. “Spare”, whose title is minimalist like Agassi's and whose cover is similar to a frontal gaze, is a thing made up of many parts, of shreds and patches, of bitter jokes (in particular towards Harry, William, the "heir" of his "spare", which he calls "Willy") and sustained existential crises. The basic three-act structure of childhood, military service, and marital bliss is broken up like a California lot into shorter episodes and paragraphs, many of them just a sentence long.
Harry's decidedly English voice (he doesn't like kilts, for example, because of "that worrying knife in his sock and that breeze in his ass") sometimes clashes oddly with the staccato patois of a tough-talking private investigator who does the voiceover in a film noir. Describing “Gan-Gan” at Balmoral: “He wore blue, I remember, all blue… Blue was his favorite color of his.” Then, like a gunsmith, the Queen Mother orders a martini.
If there is one murder Harry is trying to solve, it is of course that of his mother, Princess Diana, whose death in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in 1997, chased by paparazzi, is the defining tragedy of his life and therefore this book. To his youngest son, who was only 12 at the time, the clicking of the paparazzi's cameras, as he derisively calls them, sounded "like the ignition of a gun or the opening of a blade." (From the looks of “Harry & Meghan,” which contains many authorized shots of the couple's courtship and children, he's fighting with his iPhone.) Diana defended herself from the constant onslaught of photographers by throwing water balloons and, more sinisterly, by hiding in the trunks of getaway cars, a trick Harry eventually learned. “I felt like I was in a coffin,” she writes. "I did not care". Editor's picks
Immersed in a "red fog" of pain and anger, the prince treats himself first with sweets and then, as the hated tabloids report with varying degrees of accuracy, with alcohol, weed, cocaine, mushrooms and ayahuasca. (More mildly he tries magnesium supplements, and I'm not sure anyone should know that this loosened his bowels at a friend's wedding.)
During his mission in Afghanistan—where, he notes, “you can't kill people if you think of them as people”—Harry repeatedly escapes to Africa, whose lions seem less threatening than the journalistic predators at home. In one of the crudest moments of the book, he writes that Willy, who calls him Harold even though his first name is Henry, accuses him of having chosen the continent as his cause. “Africa was his passion,” explains Harry, imitating his brother's petulant tone. “I let you have the veterans, why can't you let me have the African elephants and rhinos?”
Pungently he notes Willy's “alarming baldness, more advanced than mine,” while chiding the Princess of Wales for being slow to share her lip gloss. He candidly shows the then Prince Charles doing a handstand in his boxers and his family's farce on the annual performance appraisal: the court circular.
Like its author, “Spare” is a bit everywhere, both emotionally and physically. In other words, it doesn't hold on tight. Harry is frank and funny when his penis freezes after a trip to the North Pole — “my South Pole was haywire” — leaving him a “eunuch” shortly before William marries Kate Middleton. In a strange game of projections, at the reception she gives the groom an ermine thong, then applies the Elizabeth Arden cream that her mother used as lip gloss to her nether regions — “strange” doesn't do justice to the sensation” — and worries about the fact that “my penis would be all over the front pages” before finding a discreet dermatologist. Therapy, which William refuses to participate in, and a whiff of First by Van Cleef & Arpels help Harry learn to cry, releasing a flood of repressed memories of Diana, and that's when even the most hardened reader might cry. Carlo's perfume, Dior's Eau Sauvage, and his marriage to Camilla leave him relatively cold.
Yet when his father advises him not to read the incessant and often racist press coverage of Harry's union with Meghan — “Don't read it, dear boy” — it's hard to disagree. The prince claims to have a spotty memory — “a defense mechanism, most likely” — but he doesn't seem to have forgotten a single line ever printed about him and his wife, and the last section of his story degenerates into a tiring back-and-forth. answer as to who is leaking what and why. Maybe a little more Faulkner and less Fleet Street would be useful?
Still bitter about the comparison between the late writer Hilary Mantel, not named here, and the royal family and pandas — “uniquely barbaric” and dehumanizing, he writes, while admitting that “we were living in a zoo” — Harry then turns around and calls three courtiers the Ape, the Mosca and the Vespa. He seems to have gone mad for "the buzz", as the inexhaustible royal chronicler Tina Brown would define it, and is constitutionally incapable of stopping doing it.
“Spare. The Minor” is a work that draws attention for the distinction between narrative technique and content of the stories told by Prince Harry and Moehringer. Inevitably, the fact that the Duke did not write the book himself influences the final result.
From a technical point of view, the memoir presents itself as a perfect expression of writing and style. Moehringer's pen flows across the pages, tracing a linear path from the days of Harry's life to the present. The pace of the narrative is fast-paced, leaving room for the prince's thoughts and impressions. The description of people and places is essential, allowing the reader to visualize the scene through essential details.
The dialogues are also essential and well managed, giving the impression of watching a film. The choice to open the book with a meeting between Charles, William and Harry after Prince Philip's funeral is an interesting one, using this situation as a starting point for the narrative of the rebel duke's life.
However, the real flaw of the book lies in Harry's constant complaints, which slow down the pace of the story. It would seem that the prince has decided to always sound the same note of victimhood, repeating it until exhaustion. The author underlines how this repetition can tire the reader, who may wish to shake Harry to make him react and escape from the self-hypnosis into which he seems to have fallen.
Additionally, Harry makes other mistakes in the book. He clearly divides his world between "good" and "bad", always taking the side of the former. He does not fully take responsibility for his words and their consequences. This lack of accountability is reflected in the Faulkner quote that Harry uses to support his reconstruction of the facts. This approach to truth could lead to a world in which every opinion becomes legitimate, a dangerous development that characterizes a certain type of politically correct thinking.
COMMENT
Despite its flaws, the book deserves to be read not only for its impeccable writing, but also for entering Harry's mind and observing the world and the royal family through his eyes (even if it must be considered that his vision may not be impartial as he would have you believe).
We may never get the Windsors' version of events, but “Spare. The Minor” offers us an opportunity to understand who Harry might be behind his accusations against the royal family. A man who still seems not to have found himself, focused on the past rather than the present, incapable of looking for a purpose and too busy complaining. Perhaps the time has come for him to understand that "there is life beyond the media and the royal family".
