Where the Bird Sings Best

In this wildly imaginative, powerfully moving, “psychomagical” autobiography, legendary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tells the story of how his Russian Jewish grandfather (also named Alejandro), his fiery wife, Teresa, and their four children moved to Chile under fake passports and assumed Christian identities, with only a half-kopek to their name, and no idea how they’d forge their new lives.

The book is a visionary family saga filled with ancestors both mythical and real—including relatives always covered in bees, women who commune with wolves, snake charmers, and militant anarchists. Where the Bird Sings Best owes its title to Jean Cocteau’s reflection: “A bird sings best on its family tree.” Drawing on history, ancestral legends, and intimate family stories, in this memoir Jodorowsky brings to bear the same unique storytelling genius he has brought to his iconic films El Topo , The Holy Mountain , and The Dance of Reality in this deeply personal search for his roots.

REVIEWS

“This epic family saga, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in structure and breadth, reads at a breakneck pace. Though ostensibly a novelization of the author's own family history, it is a raucous carnival of the surreal, mystical, and grotesque....It weaves together Jewish philosophy, passion, humor, Tarot, ballet, circuses, natural disasters, spectacular suicides, lion tamers, knife throwers, Catholic devotion, farmers, betrayals, prostitutes, leftist politics, political violence, and the ghost of a wise rabbi who follows the family from the Old World to the New.”

—Publishers Weekly

"I divide the world into two categories: the originals, and the ones who follow. The originals are the people looking differently, who take the simple elements of everyday life and make miracles. And for me, Alejandro, you are the one original."

–Marina Abramović

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alejandro Jodorowsky was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Tocopilla, Chile. From an early age, he became interested in mime and theater; at the age of 23, he left for Paris to pursue the arts, and has lived there ever since. A friend and companion of Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, he founded the Panic movement and has directed several classic films of this style, including The Holy Mountain , El Topo and Santa Sangre. A mime artist, specialist in the art of tarot, and prolific author, he has written novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and over thirty successful comic books, working with such highly regarded comic book artists as Moebius and Bess. Restless Books will be publishing three of Jodorowsky's best-known books for the first time in English: Donde mejor canta un pájaro , El niño del jueves negro and Albina y los hombres perros.