Surrender begins with the U2 singer and activist nearly dying and ends with him being born. Both episodes are floridly written, a kind of poetic grandiloquence that tempers a default long-windedness throughout these 40 chapters (the “songs” of the title).
But you don’t come to the 500+-page memoir by a big-mouth vocalist of a squillion-selling stadium act for pithiness. If Paul Hewson was born with “an eccentric heart” (a medical condition, rather than a metaphysical state), he also has 130% of a civilian’s lung capacity and a self-acknowledged tendency to “speechify”. The infamous “Bono talk”, after all, welcomes newbie rock stars to fame with an avuncular survey of the pitfalls ahead.
