Diana Athill
Still Smoking
The Year of the Jouncer
By Simon Gray
Granta Books 282pp £14.99
Surely almost everyone must have read and enjoyed this book’s forerunner, The Smoking Diaries, and, having done so, wanted more? Well, now they have got it and it is just as good. But I have to confess a problem with Simon Gray’s diary, or ongoing life story. Much of it is devoted to the annoyances, embarrassments and absurdities of old age – to what Gray calls ‘a developing sense of decay and imminent death’. Being twenty years older than he is, I find it impossible not to feel ‘What’s he going on like this for? He’s only in his sixties, for god’s sake!’ Perhaps he feels so decrepit because of his health. He drinks nothing but Diet Coke because, one is given to understand, he used to hit the bottle hard enough to shake him up, and he still smokes heavily… ‘Ass!’ think I, having managed to give it up when I was sixty-three.
But this won’t do, a man is as old as he feels. Perhaps a way to overcome this problem might be seeing him as being eighty-seven, not sixty-seven (as he was when he ended The Year of the Jouncer). It needs only a small effort of the imagination. Eighty-seven. There!
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm