Current reading is The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, which I remember being the subject of much mock tabloid horror when it came out (and yet has a glowing piece of puff from The Daily Mail on the back). What we get instead is a slow-moving description of the aftermath of a rape and murder by the victim - the gradual changes that occur to those left behind. It has a rigid plot and yet never seems defined - anything could happen and when it does we get breathtaking moments of pivotal clarity. It reminds me a lot of To Kill a Mockingbird, with the omnipresent observations of Susie Salmon a fine match for Scout's gifted-child commentary. It is sentimental but do you really want "In Cold Blood"? I have a terrible feeling that the film will have picked up on all the sentimentality and none of the cleverness of the novel. I am not tempted to see it. Susie's heaven also goes some way to answering my idea that any real paradise needs a rigid policing to ensure that everyone in it is happy with everyone else. The solution Sebold suggests is to have a personal heaven that overlaps with those of others only when beliefs and experiences are common to both - a sort of Venn-Diagram Heaven, with infinitely many circles.
Fair whistling through it I am, unlike Ed who has been three months at Gravity's Rainbow and who can blame him - my copy is somewhere, still unstarted and on the stack that must surely stretch beyond my own coil-shuffling - how sobering is that.
Time to go - I have an appointment with a rather nice tangerine. Och a Vaye.
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