Life, and What Comes After It.

David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife duly arrived and I have been reading the odd one or two at bedtime every night. They are exquisite gems of writing, Borgesian - yes - but also remind me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, although Eagleman's prose is leaner, more haiku-like. They are ingenious too, with breath-taking ideas wrapped in both wit and poignancy. Actually , I have had to hold myself back....it would be very easy to indiscriminately bolt through them in one go and fail to savour their subtle individual flavours, which would do the tales a grave disservice.

I've also just read the latest in Diana Athill's biography Somewhere Near the End. It is a slim volume and I managed to read it piecemeal in about a day. Her writing is, as one would expect from a literary grande dame, elegant and precise. Cool, even cold on occasion. I'm not sure whether she has deliberately taken the decision not to reveal her emotions concerning what would be counted by most as life-changing /traumatic events, or if she is very much of the 'stiff-upper-lip-mustn't-grumble brigade' (very possible, given her age), or if she is just completely lacking in empathy and compassion except in the most perfunctory way. I don't get the impression that she particularly cared about her family, friends or companions except in wishing to be seen to do approximately the right thing. As for the families of the married men that she had affairs with....there seems to have been an absolute absence of comprehension or interest in anything other than her own gratification and amusement. It's a pity, because I hoped that this would be a warmer book, filled with wisdom and insight garnered over 9 decades, rather than an apparently chilly dismissal of people and opinions other than her own. In a strange way, I found it reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical writings, which I have enjoyed immensely since I first read her at the tender and impressionable age of seventeen. She was certainly a cold and calculating fish, but possessed of an intellectual vigour (and rigour) that is missing in Athill. I must start reading de Beauvoir again soon.

Decadence and la nostalgie de la boue

Part way through 'The Liar' by Stephen Fry and am starting to lose interest slightly: the bits where he writes of his protagonist's youth are excellent, and thus I am assuming that it is mostly himself that he is writing about, but the episodes dealing with his later life are much less amusing or convincing. Time to start on something fresh: Huysmans' 'Against Nature', or 'A Rebours' as it is in the original. The prose is gorgeous, in the same sumptuous and slightly over-rich vein as Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' (which I never finished, having had a surfeit of gorgeousness and the same feeling as if I had gorged a box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting). I rather like the 'hero' and his neurasthaenic extreme aestheticism. I am reminded of my late teenage years when I immersed myself in Gauloises, Pernod, Baudelaire and a nostalgie de la boue which lead me to mistakenly marry a complete idiot thus bringing my young self back to earth with a nasty bump! Fortunately, that is all far in the past and having extracted myself from la boue I became a wiser and more cynical person. One lasting influence from that bout of teenage Francophilism was an abiding interest in the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I ascribe a lot of my determination to her and her refusal to allow her sex to interfere with her intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately she harnessed herself to the toad-like Sartre and lived for much of her life in his shadow, despite the fact that she was the one whom Sartre trusted to critique his work, and whose ideas he often purloined and passed off as his own. Their relationship was lifelong, hardly exclusive and they often conspired to seduce and manipulate those who should have been able to trust them. I've not read the book detailing their correspondence: I fear that I would lose any faith that I had in 'Castor' (Sartre's nickname for de Beauvoir) left by Deirdre Bair's uncompromising biography. Suffice to say that two of my favourite comfort books are still de Beauvoir's 'Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter' and the follow-up volume of her autobiography 'The Prime of Life'. Obviously it is written from her point of view, and leaves out that which is inconvenient for her to remember or write about, but her spirit shines through - the spirit that motivated a younger self to Get The Hell Out.