Thomas Jones writes:

One of the lessons of this darkly hilarious story is that the man telling it is impulsive, persuasive and not terribly reliable. Here is someone who would never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. He doesn’t pretend otherwise: ‘I do not ask for better than not to be believed,’ he writes in one of his prefaces. But it is one of the duties of a biographer not to let a good story stand in the way of the facts, and Bengt Jangfeldt’s new life of Munthe is nothing if not dutiful. He does a thorough and in its way fascinating job of sorting out the chronology, filling in the holes and tempering the exaggerations of Munthe’s account. ‘As a source-book, The Story of San Michele is a quagmire,’ he observes. One of the exaggerations is exposed without your having to read a word, or even open the book: ‘I have never submitted to be photographed since I was 16 years old,’ Munthe claims, ‘except for the unavoidable snapshots for my passport when I served in the Red Cross during the war.’ But there he is on the cover of Jangfeldt’s book, in a three-quarter pose, gazing intently past the camera into the middle distance through his pebble glasses; and there are several more photos of him inside, which seem to have been taken neither without his knowledge nor under duress.

(LRB 29 January 2009)

I B Tauris | paperback 381 pp. |ISBN: 9781845117207