The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (37 page)

I do love Philip Roth. But as Jane Eyre will tell you, love can be ugly.

Also, must try and keep these entries shorter.

Philip Roth: another apology

I would like to apologise for the appalling narcissism of the previous post, unless that's what blogs are for and why people like them. I'm really not sure.

Today is Day 2 of reading:
Everyman
by Philip Roth.

Everyman
– yes. A great book? No. A small book by a great writer.

No one constructs sentences like Roth. They need to be read and re-read for their rhythm and their absolute confidence. I say this with the oft-expressed misgivings about his characters' view of women. There is an outrageous line in this book about there being little more to the protagonist's third wife than her asshole, the asshole she gladly offers him for sex; less, in fact. Less to her than her own asshole! But if you took out the streak of misogyny and the unquenchable libido, you wouldn't have Philip Roth – a recklessly honest, semantically fastidious and unrepentantly dirty old genius.

Note to self: when this is all over, finish
American Pastoral
.

Next:
Absolute Beginners
, followed by
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. Looking forward to it.

Today is Day 3 of reading:
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes.

Today is my 39th birthday. If I live another year, I shall be very old.

The opposite of word-of-mouth recommendation.

After
Don Quixote
and
Beyond Black
, I had been planning to try Lampedusa's
The Leopard
. But this morning some over-opinionated fathead in the newspaper – a regular columnist – announced that he will be taking
The Leopard
to the beach this year, as he does ‘
every summer
'. ‘
One of the most evocative, poignant, elegiac and melancholic portraits of lost love and lost values, and much shorter than
Anna Karenina,' notes this paid-by-the-adjective windbag. This has put me right off
The Leopard
. Am I the only one who gets infuriated by this sort of self-regarding culture-bragging?

Decide to read
The Epic of Gilgamesh
instead.

I am aware there is some irony at work here but I prefer not to put my finger on it.

Today is Day 1 of reading:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
.

‘Gilgamesh is the first work of world literature and remains one of the most important. Written in ancient Mesopotamia in the second millennium BC, it predates
The Iliad
by roughly 1000 years. Lost for almost two millennia, the eleven clay tables [
sic. This is a misprint; they mean ‘tablets'
] on which the epic was inscribed were discovered in 1850 in the ruins of Nineveh, and the text was not deciphered and fully translated until the end of the century.'

The historical importance of
Gilgamesh
is obvious, but that is not why I wanted to read it. It was the favourite book of a man I used to work with at a bookshop in Earl's Court in London. His name was David and he was, and still is, an artist; I heard him on the radio recently discussing his latest sound-piece. He answered James Naughtie's questions with the same seething politeness with which he handled customers in the shop and also most of his colleagues. He acquired titles for the Art section; other than that, he preferred to stay off the shop floor and spend his time in the stock room, unpacking new books and, three months later, returning those same books to their publishers – our branch was more an outpost of Empire than a going concern. David was both charismatic and intimidating. In addition to
Gilgamesh
, he was also an advocate of, variously: expensive black t-shirts from stylish boutiques (as opposed to the cheap ones from Camden market that I wore); vintage medical slides of hermaphrodites, amputees, etc., which he would flick through during tea-breaks, laughing quietly to himself; the concept albums of Laurie Anderson; photographic portraits by Joel-Peter Witkin, decadent tableaux composed of severed body parts, fat women knocking nails into their own heads, etc.; drinking beer in the pub after work; Polaroid photographs of ironing boards, in use or propped up in repose, which he
intended to publish in a book, a high-quality cloth-bound limited edition of one (I hope he did this); and the novel
Moby-Dick
.

David liked
Moby-Dick
a lot. Did I first try to read it to get in with him? Probably. Of course I never finished it; it was only recently, at the fourth attempt, I made it past the first few chapters (see blog entry for 15 April for confirmation). But I nodded along in the pub and got my round in.

At this time, one of our co-workers was a chap called Mike, the singer in a band called The Becketts. At David's urging, Mike read
Moby-Dick
straight through, no trouble. In fact, he was so taken with the book, The Becketts recorded a song about it on their second album,
Myth
. The song was called ‘The Whiteness of the Whale' and it ingeniously condensed 600 pages of Melville's prose-poetry and cetological symbolism into three and a half indie-rockin' minutes. The chorus went:

‘Ship to shore!

What Ahab saw

Before it drooowned him!'

Ingenious, and catchy too.

Anyway,
Gilgamesh
. I don't remember exactly what it was David – never Dave – liked so much about
Gilgamesh
but I know it was the first time I had ever heard of the book; reading it now,
fifteen years later, is probably another belated attempt to get in with him. David, I am actually reading it: I owe you a pint, it's astonishing. If I were to condense it in song, the chorus would go like this:

‘Gilgamesh!

God or flesh

You're only huuuuman!'

(Which, if you don't know what happens in
Gilgamesh
, is
really
ingenious, believe me.)

Today is Day 2 of reading:
The Epic of Gilgamesh
.

From
Gilgamesh
, the key to happiness, the meaning of life:

‘Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savour your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean,
let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.'

Those words were written four thousand years ago. Is this the wisdom of the ancients? Or the sort of self-help guff you get on the back of a packet of herbal remedy? Try Gilgamesh – now available in tablets.

Thinking about heading over to Broadstairs next weekend for the Dickens Festival. Anyone going?

Today is Day 1 of reading:
I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith.

Another novel about poverty: the effects of poverty and the fear of falling into poverty. Of the thirty-two books so far completed on the List of Betterment, nearly half have had poverty as a central or significant theme.