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
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
