100 Per Cent Proof: A Reading Diary

Current read: The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray
Where / how acquired: From Book & Comic Exchange, Pembridge Road, Notting Hill
Vibe: A darkly comic stream of consciousness from the now late playwright

I started reading this a couple of weeks before Xmas but really got stuck into it as soon as I had some free time in the holidays. It's a book impossible to read out of its context, namely, that the author is now dead, killed by the habit that makes up his title. But stranger still that the book opens with a dinner between Simon Gray and Harold Pinter, where the latter reveals that he has cancer - the cancer that finaly killed him on Xmas eve, I think it was. Pinter plays more than a bit part in The Smoking Diaries so these are mediations from beyond the grave in more ways than one.

It was billed as laugh-a-minute and really isn't, which isn't to say I back track from the darkly comic description above. Gray meanders around all sorts of subjects, mostly quite personal ones, and his honesty, and indeed the bravery of the editor at Granta to (at least seemingly) print the author's diaries simply as he writes them, even with his ridiculously long sentences, is what's really touching. In many ways his is a tale of failure, despite his obvious outward successes - towards the end he catalogues a series of financial cock-ups which had left him (comparatively) penniless - which makes him frankly a much more interesting diarist than someone whom led a life of unmittigated victory. The only dilemma though is - does that mean I've just read and enjoyed a misery memoir??