I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU

Catalogued by the publishers as fiction, though I should call it essays, sketches, random personal experiences, a catch all of a title, with small spoiled Barbara as recurrent motive. Bemelmans injects a fictional quality into his personal experiences as in Small Beer; equally frothy. The settings shift from Paris, where he hired a thief of international disrepute as nursemaid to Barbara; to Bavaria where an extra glass gave him the courage to make fun of Hitler; to Ecuador where he was pursued by the headhunter souvenir sellers; to New York where the perfect valet he had engaged joined up with De Gaulle (and lost him $100). Fun but not up to scratch.