The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ started but been unable to finish. For instance, I knew for a fact that on 16 June 1992, after just a couple of pages, I had stopped reading The Unnamable, because a till receipt marked the ignoble spot. You must go on; I can’t go on; I, er, didn’t go on.

      These were all books, to a greater or lesser extent, that defined the sort of person I would like to be. They conveyed the innate good taste someone like me would possess, effortlessly. If you asked me if I liked Patrick Hamilton’s work, for example, I would almost certainly reply in the affirmative. Moreover, I thought of myself as ‘a Patrick Hamilton fan’ – despite never having read anything by Patrick Hamilton. It was easy to maintain these two apparently contradictory positions; one did not necessarily cancel out the other. It seemed inevitable that I would become a Patrick Hamilton fan once I found the time to read him, so why refrain from assuming that identity in advance? It need not even alter if I were to discover that, on settling down with a book by Patrick Hamilton, I didn’t much care for it. There would always be another book I might read at some hazy point in the future and like more, confirming the high opinion I had of Patrick Hamilton, though to date I had read nothing which matched up to the esteem in which he was held by me. And with this certain prospect fixed on the horizon, so the likelihood of ever reading Patrick Hamilton receded still further. I was the victim of a self-confidence trick.

      The same might be said of the entire list. Because I had already forged a connection, presumed a familiarity, with every title on this piece of paper, they summoned up friends or conversations or specific moments from the past; but what lay behind the titles was a blank, and memories which ought to have cheered me instead induced prickles of embarrassment and even guilt, for they evoked little more than my own insincerity. Finally coming to terms with these books would be like reclaiming these far-flung moments and restoring their fidelity, or simply acknowledging and settling a debt.

      I considered myself to be well-read. Could someone honestly call themselves well-read without reading Middlemarch, Moby-Dick and Anna Karenina? Probably not. However, this list was a start. With Middlemarch and The Master and Margarita behind me, it seemed possible that in the next few weeks, all these books could tumble. They would become part of the texture of my life as it was now. Even the thought of it was revitalising; more than that, it was a relief. I could begin to stop pretending.

      Marx and Engels, for example. When I was seventeen, our school organised a week-long visit to Berlin. This was several years before the Wall came down. About a dozen sixth-formers made the trip. We stayed at a hotel in the West and at night went out to bars and strip-clubs off the Kurfürstendamm – well, the others did, including the teachers. I was much too puritanical. I stayed in my room and read Brighton Rock.

      On two occasions, we crossed over to East Berlin, which I much preferred to the decadent West. Yes, it was dour and repressed – but I was too. I wish I could remember more about these excursions. I can dimly recollect long avenues of shabby apartment blocks lined with identical cars, and shops with sternly rectilinear window displays. Everything looked as though fashion and maintenance had abruptly ceased in the early 1960s, which of course they had.

      If you were a tourist, the East German authorities obliged you to change twenty-five Deutsche Marks at the border. You were not permitted to carry this money back to the West at the end of your daytrip. In other words, while you were in East Berlin, you had to find something to spend twenty-five Marks on. In Alexanderplatz, my schoolmates converted their cash into beer and grainy strawberry ices. However, I was captivated by the State-run book and record shop, which had about four Melodiya Beatles and Pink Floyd cassettes for sale, and numerous hardbacks of Karl Marx translated into English. There was nothing modish or faux about these editions. They were big, no-nonsense bricks, with just the title on the dust jacket, bordered by orange stripes along the top and bottom, as though their designer still vaguely recalled a Penguin Library paperback he had seen decades earlier. I bought a copy of Capital and another volume called The Holy Family and smuggled them back home in my suitcase.

      I’m sure I believed I might read these hefty Marxist tomes; I certainly did not buy them solely for the effect they might have on my mother. But the effect they did have on my mother was so electric and so immediately gratifying, that thereafter reading them never really entered the picture. There was no need. They were accessories to a half-formed left-wing conception of the world which I had no immediate urge to deepen. Besides, at a recent parents evening my mother had been informed in all seriousness by one teacher that me and my best friend Matthew Freedman were communists, so someone else was doing the work for us. (This notoriety was the result of a General Studies discussion in which we had ventured the heretical proposition that there might be some justification in the then-current Miners’ Strike.)

      So twenty years later, when my mother discovered her only son loitering on a city street corner with The Communist Manifesto, it must have seemed, despite his toiling obediently for the capitalist system since graduation, accumulating a significant amount of property, and raising a child along doggedly bourgeois lines, like further evidence of his stubborn refusal to grow up. And – oh, Andrew – who is to say she was wrong?

      Of course, then as now, although I was happy to be perceived as a communist, I had no serious yen to be one. This was not from a position of political principle but because of the effort required to first grasp and then assimilate a set of rules to which I would be expected to adhere. So instead I went with a liberal, left-of-centre position and told myself the half-truth that I had been more militant in my youth and that I had mellowed with age. In this, I was scrupulously in step with my generation, the one which spent thirteen years fretting at the lack of socialism in the New Labour government, yet which had made a journey of its own from youthful idealism to battered pragmatism in the face of political reality, career advancement and the school run.

      With this journey behind me, I found it much harder to read The Communist Manifesto at thirty-seven than I would have done at seventeen, not because its philosophy was difficult to grasp but because it was true to life. The gloomy picture of the world it proposed might have seemed romantic to me then; now it felt dismayingly like the one I actually lived in.

      Prior to The Communist Manifesto, I had read Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Ah, Bukowski. When I was in my early twenties, it seemed like everyone I knew – every male, I should say – read Bukowski. These men of my acquaintance listened to the Go-Betweens, drank Guinness from a straight glass and loved Bukowski like little girls love ponies. From their descriptions of his work and what was good about it, Bukowski sounded like precisely the kind of writer there would be no point in liking if everyone else liked him. So I never bothered.

      All these years later, I had soaked up Post Office in little more than a day. Bukowski’s alter ego, Henry Chinaski, a substitute postman and a drunk, gambled and screwed and occasionally made his mail round and then it was over: tick. The style was fragmentary and brutal. I was given to understand his other novels told a similar, if not identical, tale in a similar, if not identical, register. In an inversion of the old saying, when you’d read all Bukowski’s books, you’d read one of them; they were all postcards from the same place, scrawled in a defiantly shaky hand.

      As a book about work, though, Post Office was even bleaker than The Communist Manifesto, which at least offered potential resolution, i.e. total destruction of the apparatus of capital. Henry Chinaski’s solution to the same problem was a cocktail of booze, horses and pussy. It would be nice to think the latter was at least an achievable goal but as Chinaski noted in the first few pages: ‘It began easy. I was sent to West Avon Station and it was just like Christmas except I didn’t get laid. Every day I expected to get laid but I didn’t.’ And, figuratively at least, this too rang true with the world I found myself living in.

      Work was preying on my mind. I had a good job in a successful business yet every day when I set off for the office, somewhere in the back of my head I could hear Sonya’s lamentation from the closing scene СКАЧАТЬ