The Death of Marco Pantani

Matt Rendell
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 320 pages, £8.99

Among his many honours, he won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season, a feat now considered all but impossible. He was the first Italian to win the Tour since the ’60s. But no matter how many impressive exploits I list, nothing will take away the fact that he cheated his entire career.

Pantani was tiny – he weighed just 57kg (9 stones) and was 5′8″ – but had an enormous power to weight ratio that made his a near ideal climber’s physique. He was known as ‘Il Pirata’ (The pirate) because of his penchant for bandanas and earrings, and a propensity to attack and attack again. These things made him an enormously popular rider.

Away from cycling, Pantani led a very troubled life, which increasingly revolved around prostitutes and drugs. In 1999, he was expelled from the Giro d’Italia following the conclusion of the penultimate stage while in an almost unassailable lead for the General Classification, and his career and life never recovered. In 2004, aged 34, he died in a tatty hotel room in Rimini of a massive overdose of cocaine.

Matt Rendell’s book is a very detailed account of Pantani’s life and career and contains a forensic account of his death. There is a very convincingly argued look at the evidence for Pantani’s use of doping products, extracted from databases used to track athletes’ performance and medical records of blood tests conducted prior to surgery. Every piece of evidence shows that Pantani’s hematocrit level followed a yearly pattern in which it peaked at levels rarely if ever seen in healthy individuals around the time of the Tour and dropped off afterwards, a pattern that would not be observed in even the most esoteric pathologies.

The weight of evidence is too great to dismiss, especially given that most of it does not relate specifically to doping controls and therefore would not have been subject to masking techniques that athletes use to fool testing regimes.

Many of Pantani’s contemporaries, Bjarne Riis and Richard Virenque for example, have subsequently admitted to their use of EPO, although Lance Armstrong continues to deny using it. Riis was stripped of his one Tour de France victory, and Pantani should be too. But, really, EPO use was so widespread at that time that it’s difficult to believe that there were any clean riders in the peloton.

Pantani denied using performance enhancing drugs and hinted repeatedly at some vast conspiracy to frame him. Needless to say, the only conspiracy was his own to cheat the authorities and, ultimately, the fans into believing that his performances were legitimate.

Rendell’s book forms an useful companion to David Millar’s excellent Racing Through the Dark for those seeking to understand the science and practice of blood doping. It is, however, a rather dense and repetitive book, not to mention a bleak one. Despite that, I’d recommend it to anyone interested in road cycling. It’s a desperately sad story, but one that needed to be told.

Related posts:

1. Racing Through the Dark by David Millar
2. We Were Young and Carefree by Laurent Fignon
3. How I Won the Yellow Jumper by Ned Boulting

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson
Little, Brown 2011, Hardcover, 656 pages, £25.00

The result is a book that those with a casual interest in the technology world will find informative. However, technology experts, particularly those who follow Apple closely, will be disappointed. There are scattered technical errors and assertions by Isaacson that betray his lack of expertise but mostly the problem is that he hasn’t really uncovered enough that is new.

Shortly after Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple, in August this year, Fortune magazine released a compilation of its articles about Jobs and Apple. I was halfway through it when Jobs’s death was announced in early October.

The Fortune anthology, All About Steve, is a treasure trove. It covers Jobs’s time with Apple in the 70s and 80s, his ‘wilderness years’ nurturing Pixar and NeXT, and his triumphant return to Apple. What’s particularly fascinating is that, because these articles are presented as they were published at the time, it’s possible to test their predictions against what actually happened. It’s a vivid demonstration of just how often Jobs’s visions of the future turned out to be correct.

If you read the Fortune anthology and Wired’s more recent ebook, Steve Jobs: Revolutionary, you’ll learn just as much about how Apple’s products were developed as you would from reading Isaacson’s book. Indeed, having read both shortly before reading Isaacson, I was struck by how much the biographer had drawn from them.

The Fortune articles offer lots of detail on the early years of Apple. The company, just making a name for itself, was less secretive then and as time has passed more people have told their story of working on the Apple Lisa, the Apple Mac and the company’s other groundbreaking products.

Isaacson repeats a lot of the stories from those Fortune articles and others that Apple followers will already know from other books, blogs and websites. He offers lots of detail on areas that have already been widely covered elsewhere but as the book moves towards the present day, there are fewer details of life inside Apple.

Less has been published about Apple’s more recent products – though Wired’s iPhone article is excellent – and as a result Isaacson has less to offer. It really appears that, on the product side of things, Isaacson did not uncover much new information. It’s not clear whether that’s because he wasn’t interested or wasn’t able to get the answers.

What you do get from Isaacson is more detail on Jobs’s private life and his personality. Asked why he consented to the book, Jobs told Isaacson: “I wanted my kids to know me.” To this end, there is a lot about Jobs’s childhood, particularly his relationship with his adoptive parents. We get lots of details of his faddish eating habits, his interest in meditation and occasional sections on his romantic life.

The man that emerges is fascinating but also hard to like. Jobs was controlling, manipulative and could be savagely cruel. Most bizarrely, he was prone to breaking down in tears when things didn’t go his way. This continued well into his adult life; he even cried when he was told that the original iMac would have to have a CD tray, rather than his preferred option – a less intrusive CD slot.

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief and one of Jobs’s closest colleagues, tells Isaacson:

“But there are times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does that.”

And yet, time and time again Isaacson talks to former colleagues who say that working with Jobs was the best time in their career. His former girlfriends acknowledge that he could frequently be difficult and unreasonable and yet they speak fondly of him. Jobs’s enormous charisma appears to have been enough to balance the unpleasant side of his personality.

Isaacson gives comprehensive coverage of the cancer that ultimately killed Jobs. At times it made for harrowing reading but Jobs’s determination to continue his work despite the disease was admirable. The story Isaacson tells of Jobs in hospital, rejecting the oxygen mask he was being given and demanding to see alternatives, demonstrates just how obsessed the man was with perfection in design.

Given the time that Isaacson spends on Jobs’s cancer it’s noticeable that the book moves almost straight from his resignation as Apple CEO to his death. It seems clear that there wasn’t time for Isaacson to write much about Jobs’s last days before the book’s release.

That sense of the book being rushed is apparent every now and again in the text. Names are mis-spelt, for example, and quotes are repeated in different chapters. Delaying the book might have given time to fix those mistakes and also would have allowed Isaacson to cover the tributes to Jobs, from family, friends and colleagues.

Overall, this isn’t a bad book. Those starting with little knowledge of Apple will find most of what they need here. However, readers who know Apple – and I imagine they would be a significant audience for this book – will be letdown. Isaacson could, and should, have done better with this book.

Related posts:

1. German Modernism: Music and the Arts by Walter Frisch (James’s book 6, 2011)
2. The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V Higgins (Shane’s book 35, 2011)
3. The Counterlife and Deception by Philip Roth (Shane’s books 22 and 23, 2011)

I found it in a beautifully preserved first edition on a recent trip to Hay-on-Wye and read it in no time at all. It’s a very slim volume, packed with personal reminiscences and the musical isights of one of the 20th century’s finest conductors on perhaps (we have no way of knowing today) its finest.

Walter’s book has, of course, been picked over by biographers, so there is little here that will be new to people who have read a few programme notes on Mahler’s music. But I didn’t know the charming story of Mahler regularly going walking in the Alps with a kitten in each of his two coat pockets. Somehow I find it both easy and hard to reconcile that with the ruthlessly professional conductor and writer of gargantuan symphonies. If you listen to Mahler’s music with open ears, you’ll hear many examples of his mischievous wit along with his bitter irony, regretful longing and impassioned feeling. And, in fact, what more Mahlerian image could there be than the man alone in an epic landscape with two kittens for comfort against solitude?

My love for Mahler’s music is boundless, even for its flaws, for all its love of cliché and occasional melodrama. Bruno Walter’s book is almost hagiographic, but his love for Mahler and his works is shot through the entire thing, and his occasional sentimentality is forgivable just as it was in his master.

Rest in peace, maestri.

Related posts:

1. German Modernism: Music and the Arts by Walter Frisch (James’s book 6, 2011)

It’s the very definition of a one-way trip to Regretsville, where even the highest highs (more money than they knew what to do with… the entire extended family living in a luxurious pleasure-dome… food and health care for the poor of Medellin) feel hollow, so low are the lows we know are to come.

Escobar

Roberto Escobar
Hodder & Stoughton 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £11.99

I chose this book because I find true crime fascinating, and organised crime especially so (after reading Mario Puzo’s The Sicilian at 12, I decided I wanted to marry into the mafia and then pressed my parents for tips as to how I might meet a mobster). But I chose this particular account of Escobar’s story because I felt that, coming from an Escobar, the narrative would be less likely to edge into War on Drugs, God Bless America propaganda territory. I wanted to know what actually happened… or at least, as close as I could get to it.

People fragment themselves: Pablo Escobar ordered thousands of murders and carried out many by his own hands; he also lavished money on Medellin’s poor and was a tender father to his children. Stitching these two halves into a whole is a difficult task, both for the writer and for the reader. Roberto Escobar does his level best, but the result is a story that feels shallow and the precise points where this reader wanted depth and detail.

Pablo didn’t kill people as often as people “were murdered” (by some unseeable force, perhaps?); violence tends to be something the police commit against the brothers Escobar, et al, versus the other way ‘round; upon his arrest at last, Roberto’s only crime, in his own eyes, was “Rh: that I have the same blood as my brother Pablo”. Well, that, money laundering, harbouring a fugitive, aiding and abetting various crimes, etc etc. Sorry Roberto, your crime of Rh comes up a little short. More than once, I felt a sense of frustration with Roberto’s approach. It reminded me of the time I took a tour through a famous prison and the tour guide spent forever promenading us through the manicured hedges, only to scamper past the really gruesome bits, dismissing it as “Oh, death row, not all that interesting”. But Roberto, this is why I read the book. I *want* details. The dishes your mum cooked you and Pablo aren’t as interesting to me as the ins and outs of the drug trade.

Still, Escobar is a good read, and its author’s curious focus is perhaps evidence of a coping strategy for anyone who has been through what he has been though. It’s easier to white-wash.

Final, technical note: Escobar is billed as being ‘as told by his brother Robert Escobar’. The person to whom it has been told is the book’s co-author, David Fisher. Fisher has a light touch: the book reads like the narrative of someone whose grasp of English isn’t entirely there. I took this as intentional, and although it works with Roberto’s gloss-over-the-nasty-bits style, it did distract me a little – I kept wondering what juicy bits I was missing.

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James Joyce (Oxford Lives)

Richard Ellmann
Oxford Paperbacks 1984, Paperback, 906 pages, £22.50

It’s an incredibly detailed book, and one that takes many, many hours to read (more than 24 hours of reading in my case). But if you want to improve your understanding of Joyce’s work, it is an essential read. One of the most satisfying elements of the book is the way that Ellmann consistently refers back to the work, perhaps most importantly with Joyce’s last novel, Finnegans Wake. There are several examples of Joyce literally writing an everyday incident into whatever work he was working on at the time. Ellmann’s work is crucial to unpicking such apparent caprices.

Joyce was not, it’s fair to say, a terribly nice man. He was particularly obnoxious to his longsuffering brother Stanislaus, but his wife, father, friends and benefactors all received rude, ungrateful and unfair treatment at his hands. He was a serial borrower, and it would be an interesting (sorry) exercise to tot up all of the debts – many, perhaps most of them, petty – that remained unpaid at his death. When he had money, earned borrowed or wheedled, he spent it at an alarming pace. As a result his family lived in virtual penury until the publication of Ulysses. Ellmann sums this up nicely: “Her [Harriet Shaw Weaver] benefaction did not make him rich; no amount of money would have done that; but it made it possible for him to be poor only through extravagance.”

From reading his novels, I’ve always been surprised at how poor Joyce’s taste in music was, but the full horror of it is revealed here. One of the many gems in the book is the fascinating story of his obsessive support for an obscure operatic tenor, a tenor who chiefly performed very middle of the road operatic fare. For a revolutionary in his own field, Joyce was an arch conservative in music, for all his work’s ear for musical detail, unlike Proust, for whom music was perhaps equally important (think of the importance of Vinteuil’s ‘little phrase’ in the vast schema of Proust’s novel).

Every twist and turn of Joyce’s constantly changing domestic arrangements, his arguments, his friends, his manuscripts, his sources and more is captured here. The detail that Ellmann gives us for the years leading up to 1904 is particularly impressive and useful in helping us to develop an understanding of his three masterpieces that cover those years of Joyce’s life: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, of course, Ulysses. I reread A Portrait straight after finishing Ellmann’s book in a frenzy of Joyce-mania, and it emerged anew, richly augmented with knowledge of much of the raw data and some of the alchemy that gave it life. Now I can’t wait to open Ulysses again.

Perhaps you have to be a convinced Joycean to get the most out of this book. I can see it would be boring, repetitive and even trivial to someone who hadn’t already encountered his work. But then that’s also what might happen if you tried to read his work without an understanding his life. More than any other writer (other than Proust, perhaps), Joyce’s work and life are an indivisible whole. He was the embodiment of Wilde’s idea of a man as work of art. For that reason, Ellmann’s book is an essential work.

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Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis
Vintage Books USA 2002, Paperback, 288 pages, £9.58

Having passed my fortieth birthday, I’m fully entitled to get my grouchy on, and nothing is likely to make that happen than the facile notion that history needs to be narrated as though it were a drama sketched out in advance. Ellis takes this approach for his opening chapter, which concerns the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in the former’s death and the latter’s disgrace.

I’m not naive – at least not about this – I know that this is what publishers think readers want, but it’s painful to have to be told a familiar story as though it were a thriller, and this approach does a disservice to Ellis’s frequently telling insights. The same plague affects his telling of the Jefferson/Adams friendship, feud and reconciliation, with its improbable and all-American ending. It’s the written equivalent of TV documentaries that dramatise events in case our imaginations are too sluggish to be able to grasp the nature of the events.

The rest of the book is much better, in particular the chapter in which Ellis considers the long term impact of Washington’s Farewell Address. Similarly interesting is his discussion of the political manoeuvring around the selection of the location for the nation’s capital. As with so many issues of the time, the result was a compromise that smoothed over differences on the slavery issue that would lead directly to the Civil War. Despite his other great accomplishments, Jefferson comes out of this episode badly, as he does whenever his role vis-a-vis slavery, and even more especially when his double-dealing as John Adams’s vice-president come up.

It’s a short book, and it can’t, doesn’t seek to, match the depth of investigation that a longer book could achieve. Despite its sometimes clumsy dramatisation of events, it contains many fascinating details and much useful analysis.

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Napoleon

Frank McLynn
Pimlico 1998, Paperback, 752 pages, £16.99

McLynn is a rather leaden writer, and it is hard to stay with him through 700 odd pages without lapsing into boredom. His style is extremely repetitive, especially when writing about people in Napoleon’s circle for whom he has an obvious enmity. Chief among these are Talleyrand, Murat and the Emperor’s sister, Pauline. McLynn has a habit of using the same pejorative adjective every time he mentions one of these personalities (for Talleyrand, for example, it is invariable ‘venal’, for Pauline, ‘nymphomaniac’).

McLynn also has a problem with women generally. Hardly any woman in his narrative emerges well, and some are condemned out of hand for the simple exercise of their sexuality. Pauline is criticised almost every time she appears for her ‘insatiable’ sex drive, and so on. McLynn is never able to tell us what is immoral about having sex on a regular basis, or even why it should be wrong for a woman to have several sexual partners. Worse still is that males in the story, none more than Napoleon himself, are not judged on equivalent terms, so the act of sleeping with many women is merely a fact of their lives rather than a moral basis upon which to condemn them. This prejudice against certain individuals and patterns of behaviour clouds the entire narrative.

McLynn is better at showing how Napoleon, far from being the liberal lawgiver he is sometimes portrayed as, was a profoundly conservative leader whose main aim was to establish a new elite and nobility – what we would today call an oligarchy – to replace the one so recently swept away by the French Revolution. Napoleon was happy to deploy his considerable power to exclude enemies as well as to promote, ennoble and enrich his friends. In many ways, Napoleon was a ruler without ideology and reminds me powerfully of Vladimir Putin. The reason for exercising power was power itself.

Here again McLynn reveals the poverty of his moral vision as he derides the ludicrous procession of Napoleon’s family and friends to assume kingships and other ennoblements. Ludicrous they were, not because they were of insufficient class, as McLynn thinks, but because the very idea of these pompous and unaccountable posts is laughable in the first place. As a genuinely great contemporary of Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, was to remark, the very idea of kings is evil. Monarchies don’t become satisfactory when the incumbent is of sufficient “breeding”; they are simply unsatisfactory all of the time. If the French Revolution was fought for anything at all, it was this, and Napoleon betrayed it in the most comprehensive way possible. He truly was the enemy of progress.

Napoleon’s military record is considerably more patchy than is commonly recognised, with his few genuinely great victories (Austerlitz and Marengo foremost among them) dwarfed by the scale of losses sustained in Russia and the otherwise largely indecisive battles fought after 1805. Given that Napoleon fought so many battles, McLynn has no choice but to deal with them in detail, but his descriptions merge into one another and, without the aid of maps for most of them, the narrative is hard to follow.

McLynn is also willing to forgive Napoleon for his many egregiously egotistical actions and, despite laying the evidence of them out in comprehensive detail, sums up his account of the dictator’s life in terms that Napoleon himself could hardly have objected to. As with so many commentators on his life, Napoleon is allowed to escape the accretion of detail of his corruption, violence, misogyny and, above all, his ultimate failure, to become a figure of legend of far greater status that the sum of his parts would permit.

Napoleon was a morally bankrupt leader, a dictator, a reactionary, an enemy of liberty and of truth. He deserves the everlasting condemnation of history. McLynn entirely refuses to hand out an appropriate judgement and that is the greatest of his many failings here.

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The Boy with the Topknot

Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £9.99

What starts out as a memoir of growing up as a beloved younger son in a Punjabi family and then building a media life with white London friends as an adult soon zig-zags into family investigation. This isn’t a neatly arced story: we stumble across new developments with no real notice. Far from being an all-knowing observer dropped hints by Sanghera’s narration in some kind of Christmas Carol guided travel through his life, we come across things at the same time as he does, making it a far more accurate depiction of how surprises happen in real life. Bang! Surprise one. Bang! Surprise two. We flit from time to time (all held together easily, you don’t lose track) but you feel engaged rather than distanced. No Joanna Trolloping here.

And ah, the developments. Sorry to be a nuisance, but I’ rather not go into what some of the developments in Sanghera’s family are, partly because they’re not mentioned anywhere on the cover or in the reviews. The book would clearly like you to find out for yourself.

I will say that, while the family history Sanghera discovers is startling and frequently unsettling, this is far from being a “reboot of the misery memoir” as one of the reviews would claim. In fact, this is probably the most honest depiction of family life I’ve ever read, balanced and genuine, with things left unsaid rather than unveiled in great chapter-long confrontations.

Sanghera deserves huge credit (well, he wrote the thing, it’s fairly inevitable) for writing engagingly without being tempted by “-ising” his copy. No sentimalising, no eulogising, but still very funny and sympathetic. He’s both stern and forgiving of his younger self (who comes across – bless the past – as a marginally less un-self aware version of Adrian Mole), who – blessed with opportunities and strong parenting is left completely unaware of anything unusual in the family until the faintly staggering age of 24, and doesn’t follow it up until 30. It’s very rare to read of a discovery that doesn’t result in immediate confrontation, and refreshing – as any fule kno, life doesn’t work that way all the time.

The book’s cover makes it sound half-way between wacky East Is East/Bend It Like Beckham awakening-cum-wacky 80s memoir. It’s partly that, but this isn’t yet another eye rolling memoir offering a childhood up on a plate for us to giggle over and dispose of afterwards. Sanghera’s book is something that we all need: a memoir that depicts life and all the knotty sub-plots and quiet revelations that come along the way honestly, wittily and as naturally as you’ll get without going through it yourself.

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Stalin

Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix 2007, Paperback, 720 pages, £9.99

For all those reasons, it’s a very welcome book. But, regrettably, it suffers from being massively overwritten. Far from being the sober, scholarly narrative that one has come to expect from modern British historians such as Richard J. Evans, Ian Kershaw, Richard Overy, Orlando Figes and Robert Service, it is written in a ghoulish prose that sets out to judge the protagonists at every turn. Make no mistake, these are historical figures who need to be judged, but such judgement should be considered not sound like it has come from the pen of an airport thriller writer.

All too often, Montefiore uses cartoonish language to describe Stalin and his colleagues, words like ‘magnates’, ‘vizier’, ‘cronies’ and so forth. Here’s a particularly egregious example:

Malenkov stood up and ran forward, chins aquiver, with the desperate grace of a whippet sealed inside a blancmange.

It’s a memorable phrase, certainly, but not one that it behoves an objective historian to deploy, and it’s not attributed to a source or footnoted, so one can only assume that this is Montefiore’s own coinage. There are innumerable examples of this type of thing strewn throughout the book. He also has an annoying tic where he describes a character as follows: “This [insert cartoonish description] was [insert thing person was known for]“. For example: “this self-anointed Messianic hero worked hard to envelop his protégés in an irresistible embrace of folksy intimacy”. This recurs again and again until it becomes sickening.

Montefiore’s own prejudices are also a problem. He frequently refers with distain to the proletarian background of the protagonists, as though a shoe-maker’s son has no business being the leader of a nation, per se. He’s particularly snobbish about Khrushchev, no genius certainly, but Montefiore consistently emphasises his lack of intellect and his illiteracy, as though these things were Khruschev’s fault. There’s also a bizarre footnote when he praises Queen Victoria’s ‘graciousness’ for allowing an ageing Gladstone to be seated in her presence. I find this type of snobbery almost impossible to take.

The same thing applies to the leaders’ appearances. He has a particular problem with Yezhov – a outstandingly brutal murderer even in this group – which is reasonable enough, but he constantly stresses that Yezhov was short (’practically a dwarf’) and bisexual. These are perhaps biographical facts that we can be informed of once, rather than used as evidence of his depravity, but they do not inform us in any way about how he came to be the man he did, and Montefiore provides no evidence that they were linked in any way. Montefiore seems to be trying to suggest a connection between the ‘depravity’ of Yezhov’s sex life with his crimes, but that seems almost unbelievably stupid. And, in any case, what is ‘depraved’ about being bisexual? It’s all very puzzling, and again detracts from the historical value of the book, and it’s something that he comes back to time and time again – Stalin’s yellow eyes, Malenkov’s corpulence, and Mekhlis’s weasel face, and on, and on.

I mention these problems because they fundamentally undermine the book and its claim to historical impartiality, and this is a great pity, because we are still not as horrified by Stalin as we are by Hitler, and that is something that desperately needs to change. Stalin was a monstrously callous waster of human life, both of strangers and of his closest comrades. He was responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens, often condemning them to death as part of a quota.

Like Hitler, though, he could also be personally charming, kind and thoughtful. He was adored by his people and by his domestic staff. He lived a life of comparative simplicity, although this changed after the war. The account of the war is patchy, and there are far better accounts if that is your specific area of interest (Richard Overy’s Russia’s War is particularly good).

While the reliance on documents is laudable, Montefiore’s style fails to blend these into a smooth narrative, and the text is broken up by including several quotations per paragraph, but mixed in with Montefiore’s colourful commentary, so it becomes difficult to track what is reported documentation and what is interpretation. He also has a bizarre habit of including the sign-off on almost every telegram or letter he quotes, so the text is littered with ‘Communist Greetings! J.Stalin’, or ‘let Nikolaenko find calm and fruitful work, J.St.’ Since it’s clear from the context who is being quoted, what purpose does this serve?

This is a necessary book. Anyone interested in Stalin, Soviet history specifically or world history generally should read it, but it is a great, great shame that it suffers so many fatal flaws. For the best one-volume biography of Stalin, you should turn to Robert Service’s biography of the Vozhd, but there are telling details in Montefiore’s account that can only help round out an understanding – and a horror – of the most brutal dictator of the catastrophic 20th century.

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Nothing to be Frightened of

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2008, Hardcover, 256 pages, £16.99

Barnes’s brother is a philosopher, while Barnes himself is a novelist. These are related but wholly different genres of thought and writing. Their exchanges on death and other matters that litter this book are a wonderful way to appreciate the difference. Where Barnes wants to find the poetry in everything, to shape the narrative of his life into a novelistic whole, his brother looks for patterns of logic, and for ways of classifying phenomena in terms of the philosophical canon.

What’s also a great pleasure is that the book itself has been beautifully made and bound, with actual sown binding and everything. This was also true of Barnes’s Arthur and George, but of so few other books published today. If Barnes can persuade his publishers (Jonathan Cape) to produce such lovely objects, why can’t other authors of similar stature?

This is a fascinating, discursive book full of reminiscences, aphorisms and asides. It feels like a random ramble through a writer’s brain, but in fact is a carefully controlled piece of work. It’s one of the most beautifully poised memoirs I’ve ever read.

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