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Maybe someday
35
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
8/100Critics
61/100Scholars
Author:
Robert Gottlieb
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
December 7, 2021
Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, Greta Garbo managed, in 16 short years, to infiltrate the world's subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was 36, only made her more irresistible. Robert Gottlieb explores her as a unique phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world and, at heart, a Swedish peasant girlâuneducated, naïve, and always on her guard.
What The Reviewers Say
Much has been written about Garbo over the years, but Gottlieb, a former editor of this magazine, has produced a particularly charming, companionable, and clear-eyed guide to her life and work—he has no axe to grind, no urgent need to make a counterintuitive case for her lesser movies, and he’s generous with his predecessors. By the end of the biography, I felt I understood Garbo better as a person, without the aura of mystery around her having been entirely dispelled—and, at this point, who would want it to be?.
The why and wherefore of this woman’s extraordinary life and career is masterfully told in Robert Gottlieb’s new book, Garbo, handsomely published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, with more than 250 splendid duotone photos, an extremely thorough filmography...all part of a terrific 100-page 'Garbo Reader'.
Gottlieb seems for this project to have consumed everything written in English about Garbo and her circle.
Gottlieb is a renowned New York editor who at the age of 90 has earned the right to be self-indulgent and he chats wittily about his idol while leaving others to do the hard work of analysing Garbo’s appeal.
