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I, Fellini by Charlotte Chandler. Random House, 448 pages, $25.
"I FELT AN INSTANT affinity with his lack of respectability. There was something about his carefully planned shabbiness that went against my mother's definition of respectability. He couldn't go to school dressed like that, and he certainly couldn't go to church dressed like that." This is Fellini recalling little Federico's first sight of a clown in the bleak beach town of Rimini, where he was born in 1920. Fellini was in a sense always a gigantic child, and his first impressions were thus even more determining than most people's, most artists'. The "ample breasts of women" were noted by the kid. The key site of his growth, the Fulgor moviehouse, "was my childhood home.... I was not close to my parents"; his father was a traveling and philandering seller of wine and Parmesan cheese, his mother a sour woman longing for the Rome of her childhood. The Fulgor meant American movies, which he would dream about afterwards on the beach. The Fulgor meant, too, a veiled lady who sat smoking cigarettes in the suffocating heat and allowing herself to be groped by teenage boys, though never by the timid Federico.
These memories come from an unusual book, I, Fellini, by Charlotte Chandler, the author of a funny, richly readable book on...