Healthy Living Books Books

Rating: - An honest man writing emotional truths - with a few writer's devices
This book first came to my attention a few years ago when it popped up more than once in a newspaper's `My Books of the Year' feature. I always find myself drawn to the rare volume that is mentioned more than once across these two or three pages in which the literati deliver their annual exhortations. The coincidence of two or three fulsome recommendations led me to make a mental note at the time; a mental note consigned to that vast dark cavern of my life's lost learning. However, a very recent extended essay in the Saturday Guardian by David Lodge, written and published just after Gray's death in 2008 and extolling the merits of his writing, refreshed the memory and stirred me into making the purchase.

As ever, the dust jacket reviews exert too big an influence on me but this time I felt that I had purchased just the book for me. And so it proved - almost.

Gray does beguile with his meandering and confessional style. He describes his yellow writing pad, his pen and the various interruptions that he encounters while telling us readers what he sees before him or what he remembers across the years. A few pages in and I was hooked, proposing to revise my Christmas wish list to include all the companion volumes collected under the generic title of `The Smoking Diaries' as well as the audio versions read by Gray himself.

I didn't laugh out loud, although a number of the reviewers said that they had been unable to contain themselves, except the once when I read to my half-Italian wife Gray's accounts of Italian families on the beach cosseting and fussing over each other while this dour and uptight Englishman jotted down his observations and wished he could loosen his own emotional corset. His darker observations, on mortality, on his past addiction to alcohol, and his unconquerable devotion to cigarettes, all paint a sympathetic character rather than one deserving the chastisement likely to be meted out in this current era of `personal responsibility'. Gray shares his flaws with us, allowing us to acknowledge our own without self reproach, and creating briefly a sense of relaxed and accepting humanitarianism.

In the face of such gifts from an author my one reservation seems somewhat petty and concerns the creation of a sense of intimacy borne of the contemporaneous nature of a diary written in real time. In fact, this must be an author's, or a playwright's, clever device, created more slowly and with more attention to its intended effects. This doesn't diminish greatly the impact of this book for me, it just leaves me a little unsure about the means by which my emotional engagement has been ensured.

At the beginning of the book, Gray's old friend Harold Pinter announces over dinner with their wives, that he has just been diagnosed with cancer, the anecdotes concerning Pinter, I feel, reflecting their genuine friendship rather than something more exploitative. As I put down the book after the last page, still unsure about my overall reaction to it, I heard the news that Pinter had just died the very same day and all those feelings about an honest man writing emotional truths came back.

---

Rating: - A slow burner
I picked this book up with anticipation, having read an extract of it that I thoroughly enjoyed. I expect more of the same laughs and bitter resentments, but was somewhat confounded by the full diaries. The books is more centred around Gray's plumbing of the depths of his past, heaping mockery upon himself, expressing disgust at the man he has become, and thinking about what his fifteen year-old self would have thought of his sixty five year-old self. The last forty pages are a particularly ponderous and heartfelt affair, and for my money the best part of the book.
Gray's musings on growing old, on the changes he has seen in society and youth during his time on earth, are all written down in thoroughly digestable text, rolling on in a way that is practically unputdownable. His death marks a tragic loss.

---

Rating: - A book that slowly wins you over
The blurb on the cover of this book says something along the lines of "the funniest book I've ever read". I certainly wouldn't go that far, but after a slow start, this book gets the better of you. Dry wit in generous helpings, accompanied with some more personal, intimate truths. By the time you finish it, you'll be surprised to find you were enjoying it it more than you thought you were.

---

Rating: - Gray is still at the top of his form !
If you have read Simon Gray's other volumes of diaries you will find this is a fitting addition to your collection. Gray's self-lacerating wit is still very much in evidence and despite his documented physical decay he avoids self-pity as he invites the reader into his world of cigarettes, writing and dining.

I first read Gray's volume 'An Unatural Pursuit' and was immediately hooked by his penetrating observations of his fading professional fortunes. Whether or not you like the world of theatre is irrelavent for the enjoyment of this volume. The candid observations of this brilliant and witty man in physical and carreer decline are wonmderful.

---

Rating: - Hysterically Funny
I found myself laughing out loud on public transport but was oblivious to the stares.

The funniest thing I've read in ages - Simon Gray is a comic genius.