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.

Night Train to the Afterlife

My bed-time reading recently has been Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon. I bought it on the strength that it was very cheap when bought with the Times newspaper (£1.99 or £2.99....I can't remember) and had a glowing recommendation from Isabel Allende on the cover (' A treat for the mind' or somesuch, I can't be bothered to go upstairs and look). I've been reading it for ages and ages, a small morsel at a time. It's one of those slow burners that, even after finishing it, I'm not quite sure whether I enjoyed it or not, although when I'd finally closed the cover, I knew I'd miss it. Looking at the reader reviews on Amazon it seems that opinions on it vary widely: some people hated it, thought it was dull, stodgy, had a boring hero, that nothing happens etc., but some people gave it five stars and loved it for its glacial pace and introspection. Many commented on the poor translation from the original, but it was not something that troubled me too much. I think the whole message of the novel is that life is all about the journey, not the end destination. Poor little, boring, troubled 'Mundus' was like a worm wriggling miserably on the hook of its existence: the brief intrusion on his life by the (suicidal?) Portuguese woman coupled with the discovery of the luminous and mysterious Prado's book at the bookseller's had the effect of opening up a world of possibilities and other lives that, having had a glimpse of it, he could not bear to step away from. But he is subject to the 'Bell Jar' effect (see Sylvia Plath's book of the same name): We humans cannot escape ourselves by changing location: we carry our stale lives' atmosphere around with us, our fears, hang-ups, paranoias, shyness, whatever. They taint the freshness of wherever we go, so that it is no longer the place we originally and fondly perceived it to be.
Nicholas Lezard's paperback choice of the week, David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, reviewed in the Guardian newspaper last Saturday certainly struck a few chords with me and slotted right into my current interest in, and studies of, the hereafter. Eagleman seems an intriguing prospect as an author- a neuroscientist who writes in a style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges (whose work I just loved and devoured last year). The premise is '40 different versions of our post-life existence.....skits on the conundrums of creation itself...God, variously imagined as male, female, non-existent or concerned only with microbes...is, as often as not, in despair at how imperfect everything is, how the best intentions can go wrong...These are stories that tell us how to live our life now, to appreciate, indeed treasure, our sublunar existence...'

(never mind skipping off on pointless and unneccessary quests, touting our pack of misery with us). Needless to say, I have ordered it.
Given that there are forty separate morsels, I intend to read it over the space of forty days...a biblical concept if ever there was one