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.