You're Not Rob Snarski: Crumbs from the Cake
Rob Snarski
UWAP, $24.99
"Crumbs from the cake" takes the cake for one of best subtitles ever, capturing as it does the fragmentary nature of this memoir and the fact that autobiography can only ever be the rubble of the lived experience. Rob Snarski, who played in The Blackeyed Susans and as a guest singer with The Triffids, traces the early influences on him as a musician to listening to Elvis, Roy Orbison, Dusty Springfield and many others on his dad's radio while working in the family orchard. His balalaika-playing grandmother, who had lived through a Soviet labour camp and who watched Countdown with Snarski and his brother every Sunday night, bought him his first instrument: an accordion. Vignettes about Leonard Cohen and other memorable encounters interspersed with childhood memories make for a whimsical portrait of the muso's life.