Picked up a nice first edition paperback of these short stories. Which sped me happily to Mexico.

Sure to remain an all-time favourite of mine. He is fully into his stride, and what makes him a great writer is the underlying humour which is never very far away. Somewhat like Evelyn Waugh in this respect. His comedy is naturalist and real and human, not farce; again like the mature Waugh.

I was so looking forward to reading this book. I have been on such a Cheever jag that I suppose I could only be disappointed. It was his first full length novel, after having been a brilliant short story writer and it took him a long time, and indeed he won awards but for me it is too tricksy. I believe he had to write this to get where he was going, but there are whole chapters in diary note form, and, well I put it down twice and still picked it up before finally passing on it. But compare it to the superb Bullet Park and you see where he is going and what this one is lacking.

My Pursuit of Women. Memoirs of a horny chap. I’m not a huge Ellroy fan. I don’t think he writes quite well enough. These are early sexual memoirs, and if you like that sort of thing then you’ll like this. He seems an agreeable chap, and of course a literary star, but not, for me, a literary lion.

I really enjoyed Hollywood Moon recently but this one reads like a sequel, many of the same characters, which is fine and the story line is ok, but it needs a rewrite and probably the market demands didn’t give him time. He is a very good story teller but not a great writer.

Billed as an adventure history of Paris, I picked up and finished reading this entertaining love story of Paris by a Francophile. Many good yarns, particularly about De Gaulle and the many failed assassination attempts on him, none more extraordinary than the hundred to three hundred people apparently wounded in a hail of bullets aimed at De Gaulle inside Notre Dame Cathedral while he remained standing erect at the altar. Having learned that the failed assassination attempt on Francois Mitterand was actually organised by Mitterand himself there is more than a little suggestion that De Gaulle was somehow implicit in this failed attempt. The odd thing is that no one seems to know, and there is no record of the people who were arrested at the time. Perhaps they disappeared. There was some necessity to remove several of the most dangerous of those in Paris left behind by the Nazis at the Liberation, particularly the Milice (the military Police who collaborated so enthusiastically with the SS.) A little too, on the recently deposed mini-man Sarkozy.

Another interesting novel from the very readable Geoff Dyer. This one mimics Women in Love, two males in love with two girls in Paris, one male fails the test and goes off to live in London. One scene of sodomy from Lady Chatterley and several quotes from Hemmingway, but still many fine scenes of first love and first time in a Paris of exiles.

Or Jeff in Brixton. I attempted this novel, which is not bad at all, set in South London, but the whole depressing world of bad drugs, bad teeth, bad sex and bad weather reminded me of what a depressing scene London can be. Of course Dyer is from Oxford which accounts for the slightly smug aspect of his writing. Inverted snobbery seems the Oxford vice, even if they aren’t all inverts. But The Missing of The Somme is a most brilliant book. And Steve Martin believes that Out of Sheer Rage is one of the best novels ever. By the way the difference between Oxford and Cambridge is that Cambridge people are good at business and comfortable with being successful whereas Oxfordians have to apologise for success and pretend not to be supremely self-interested. And this is what I wrote about Geoff Dyer in 2001 when I read this one.

He is such an odd fish. In the midst of an entirely boring exposition of what appears to be an entirely boring film by Tartovsky his footnotes get out of hand, even intruding into his main text, so that we get fascinating glimpses of Geoff Dyer, who is of course the real subject of this book. His odd fishiness is partly due to his upbringing, trips to America and some quite interesting experiences with hallucinogenics.  His work swings wildly from utterly fascinating to utterly puzzling (like Jeff in Venice.) He seems to me sometimes best as an essayist, but I would also give him great credit for inventing form. He seems brilliant at this. And he is also very good at diagnosing the meaning behind images, see above.

Interviews with Terry Southern, whom I knew a little in New York, and Bret Easton Ellis, the more thoughtful of the two, plus a nice piece by Geoff Dyer on the photographs of Prabuddha Dasgupta.

I think Mailer has too much ego to be a great novelist. He has all the skills but lacks the “negative capability” which allows any character room other than Mailer himself. He is always at your elbow, sweating and drinking, and boasting of his sexual prowess and his ability to stab women literally in the front and back. This 1962/63 novel was written and published in monthly chapters in Esquire, so at least there is some excuse for the lack of editing, and the flying by the seat of the pants writing, but the anger is never very far below the surface, and the cocksure quality of the man who kills his wife, and goes on to fuck two other ladies and screw with the rest of the world, this arrogance never reaches its natural conclusion, which is what it is crying out for. The wages of sin is death, though not here, just a long series of discussions about the devil and god. It is more fun than I make it sound, but it still is flawed work.

A very beautiful book. A meditation on death, well bereavement, and a reminder of the importance of life, every second, every moment with lovers and children. A very finely written tale of a partially crippled man whose far from perfect wife is suddenly killed in their own house by a falling tree and the widowers attempts to come back to life. His wife appears to him from time to time but not in a creepy way, as bit by bit he learns to put aside his grief and open himself to a possible future. This roman a clef is told very simply and effectively with many wise observations from other characters, who tread gingerly around the whole question of grief. A good book puts you into a mood, a contemplative mood, where you experience the sufferings and joys of being human. And this is a very good book. She is indeed a very fine writer.