After a Funeral

Rating:
Summary: Ways of Living, Ways of Surviving
Review: This is the true story of the relationship between a middle-aged English publisher (Athill herself) and a young Egyptian writer. Its narrative concerns the disintegration of the writer's state of mind and, with it, of his relationship with Athill; it ends with the writer's suicide. As has been remarked about Athill's other books, this account is remarkable for its honesty. Athill is an unusually aware and articulate woman in whom the faculties of imaginative sympathy and of dispassionate appraisal are both extraordinarily strong as well as more or less equivalent (these gifts have presumably contributed towards her successful career as a publisher). I read the book as a 'debate' between two ways of existing: on the one hand the egocentric, relentless, consuming passion of the young writer; Athill's moderate, self-restraining but not unemotional rationality on the other. It is an important debate and has made for great writing before (Hamlet versus Horatio?) - partly because it is so complex: both ways of living overlap with each other and also in some way depend upon each other for definition. Each way of living, too, has something the other cannot have (abandoned emotion's intensity; rationality's ability to survive). In its own very modest way, then, this book felt to me like a classic account of life at its most real.