Reading Matters

'Until Further Notice, I am Alive' by Tom Lubbock

Non-fiction - hardcover; Granta Books; 128 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

One of my greatest fears is to lose the ability to use language, to no longer be able to speak, think, read or write. This is exactly what happened to writer and illustrator Tom Lubbock, who was chief art critic at The Independent and made his living from writing. (In the introduction to this book, his wife, artist Marion Coutts, describes their home as a "word factory" — a phrase that will resonate with anyone who churns out or edits copy for a living.)

A rare brain tumour

Lubbock's condition was the result of a rare brain tumour situated in the left temporal lobe — the area of the brain responsible for speech and language. He was diagnosed in September 2008, told he had a year or two to live, and died in January 2011. He was 53.

This extraordinary memoir is not so much a day-to-day journal of his life after diagnosis but a philosophical account of what it is like to confront death. And it is also an illuminating account of how speech and language are central to our being — and how the loss of these skills can be puzzling, frustrating and frightening.

But this is not a glum book. Lubbock is suprisingly free of self-pity. The only times he ever expresses sadness is when he thinks of his young son, Eugene, who was 18 months old when he was diagnosed, and his wife, Marion. "All the future we won't have," he writes, "is utterly heartbreaking."

A time to live and a time to die

Essentially Lubbock is resigned to his fate — in fact, he describes it as "interesting", almost as if he is going on an adventure — and he understands that it is "not something I'm going to get through or over".

On 21 October 2008, he writes:

Suppose I said: I can't stand it — what would I do? This is not a marriage I can leave, a job I can resign, a country I can emigrate from, a prison I can try to escape. There are no terms to be come to. I could kill myself, so as to escape the intolerability of dying. Almost imaginable. I could try to get myself into a state where nothing that makes it matter to me does matter. Then I would be, in effect, already dead. 

Perhaps his ready acceptance — or what sounds like ready acceptance — is helped in part by the lack of pain caused by the tumour (the brain has no pain receptors). For much of his illness he is in otherwise perfect health, apart from the occasional fit and the minor side-effects caused by his treatment.

But over time he begins to lose his language skills — and this, while not overly distressing nor unexpected, is obviously frustrating for one who relies on writing (and reading) to earn his living. He explains how he struggles to summon words when he writes and speaks, how sometimes the wrong words appear and his vocabularly gets mixed up and garbled.

On 7 July 2010, he writes:

Reading seems to have given up entirely. I listen to people on the radio, and I cannot repeat their words, nor can I grasp their points, but I can sort of recognise the articulations that are being made, they're there, beneath the surface. And at some time, I suspect, my speech will simply fail. Or rather, it will fail first of all at one competence, and then at another.

A deeply profound life-affirming read

Strangely enough, reading a memoir about a man dying is a life affirming experience; it makes you see things in a slightly different light and shows how we often live our lives blind to our own mortality.

And yet Lubbock claims "my story doesn't make a good story".

A good story would either be a steady descent towards death, or a total recovery. But I have had, probably will have, a fluctuating plotline, with ups and downs, recoveries, declines, rallies, with some kind of final wreckage or fade.

I beg to differ. For such a slim book, Until Further Notice, I Am Alive is weighty with wisdom, insight and intelligence. It's unflinchingly honest and candid, but it also exudes a beautiful sense of calm and dignity. And it's certainly the most profound book I've read all year.

'Your Voice in My Head' by Emma Forrest

Non-fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury; 224 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

When I first requested Emma Forrest's Your Voice in My Head it was on the basis that it sounded like an interesting memoir, a kind of modern day Bell Jar, about an English-born writer who tried to commit suicide in New York and the psychiatrist who saved her.

What I didn't know was that much of the book revolves around a relationship that Emma had with a Hollywood movie star that ends rather abruptly and leaves her feeling bereft. He's not named in the book and is referred to as GH (which stands for Gypsy Husband) and sounds quite lovely and interesting, albeit a little flakey. I was so intrigued by their romance and then the outfall of their break up that I couldn't resist Googling to see who GH really was.

Suddenly, it all clicked and fell into place.

Hollywood romance

Perhaps I'm the only person on the planet that, up until a few days ago, did not know that Colin Farell and Emma Forrest were once an item. (To be honest, until I started reading this book, I didn't even know who Emma Forrest was — turns out she had a rather meteoric rise as a teenage music journalist, before penning her first novel aged 21; she's now a screenwriter based in Los Angeles.)  But to dismiss this memoir as a kiss-and-tell about Colin Farrell would be wrong. It's not.

If anything the memoir is about grief and what it is like when a patient loses their trusted and much relied upon shrink. In Emma's case her psychiatrist, Dr R, died quite unexpectedly of lung cancer in 2008. She only discovered he had died two weeks after the fact when she rang his office and got the answer machine.

In this memoir, Emma uses Dr R's death as a springboard to write about the way in which this cheerfully optimistic and deeply supportive therapist helped her on the road to recovery after her failed suicide attempt in early 2000. What emerges is an unflinchingly honest account of Emma's psychiatric problems — she would sit up at night and pray to die when she was 12, began self-harming at aged 16 and became bulimic when she moved to New York aged 20. She entered a succession of damaging relationships and would go through manic phases where she worked all night and slept all day. A stint in London's Priory did not solve her problems.

No way out

She gives a wonderful account of what it is like to be caught up in a self-destructive routine — for Emma this was cutting her body and bingeing on food she would force herself to throw up — from which you can see no way out:

Chicken and egg: which comes first, looking at yourself with burst blood vessels on your eyes and vomit in your hair and having to cut yourself because you're so ugly? Or eating everything in the cupboard to try to hold down how ugly the cutting has made you? It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with an undertow, madness at least gives you an identity.

But the memoir is far from self-pitying. While there is much heartfelt frankness, the tone throughout is self-deprecating. It helps that she comes from an eccentric Jewish family because the little asides she shares, particularly about her slightly barmy father, are endearing and very witty. Her ability to see the funny side of things makes the book an entertaining read. For example, here's a couple of sentences — out of many — that made me giggle:

I hate it when Beyoncé wins a Grammy and in her speech thanks God. He didn't have time to help out in Darfur but he made sure you won an MTV Moonman.

There are witty lines like this peppered throughout the narrative. 

Heartfelt tribute

And there's something quite optimistic about Your Voice in My Head because it is ultimately a tribute to a doctor who helped a patient find herself. In many ways it is ironic that just when Emma begins her romance with GH and discovers true love for the first time, Dr R dies and she is unable to share her happiness with him. That the romance ultimately fails only serves to make Emma stronger and more able to cope with the unpredictability of life.

Dr R and GH were, to me, two sides of a coin. They made me feel so good. They made me feel I was a good person. They saw something else. They saw me.

Your Voice in My Head is an articulate, wise, funny and sad read. It is about to be made into a film and latest reports are touting Emma Watson, from the Harry Potter films, as the lead. But I can't help but wonder whether GH will play himself...?

You can read an extract of the memoir on the Guardian website.

'The Dubliner Diaries' by Trevor White

Non-fiction - paperback; Lilliput Press; 244 pages; 2010.

Trevor White was just 28 when he decided to set up his own magazine in his home town of Dublin, Ireland. He'd just spent two years "working in the publishing arm of the luxury goods industry" in New York and was keen to return home.

It was July 2000 when he came up with the following concept:

'The Dubliner' will be the definitive guide to life in Ireland's capital. The cover price will be £2.50 and the average circulation will be 20,000 copies. The magazine will be read by urbane, well-educated men and women. Handsome design and sound advice will appeal to readers who have abandoned the search for a savvy take on life in Dublin. In short, the magazine will animate the city's conversation.

This is where I confess that prior to picking up The Dubliner Diaries in a bookshop (it was the cover that drew me to it, how can one resist a moist-eyed baby tiger staring up at you from a display table?), I had never heard of (1) Trevor White and (2) The Dubliner magazine. But it seems that for a short time -- well, seven years actually -- Mr White and his monthly title were very well known, and much despised, in Dublin.

Initially it would appear that White wasn't particularly popular, probably because he wasn't a local boy made good, but because he was local rich boy -- and a Jewish one at that -- with upper-class connections and, dare one say it, pretensions. But later on it seems as if he could not put a foot right: circulation never increased beyond the first issue's 8,312, opinion in the press wavered from scorn to downright hatred, and several legal wrangles mired White in difficulty -- and embarrassment.

But having the audacity and courage to launch a magazine -- he funded it by releasing €200,000 of equity from a house which had tripled in value since he purchased it in 1994 -- is one thing, to keep hanging on in the face of adversity and mounting financial losses is another. (In the first year of trading, the magazine lost €264,306, which, according to the Sunday Business Post, White "admitted that he hadn't expected these results when he launched the publication two years ago".)

What makes The Dubliner Diaries such a great read is that White never shies away from being completely honest with himself -- he uses a rather endearing self-deprecating tone throughout, as if he is very much aware of how pompous and narcissistic he might sound otherwise. But, to be fair, he never makes excuses and always acknowledges when he's done wrong. He even goes so far as to say that publishing is one giant learning curve, where it's vital to learn from your mistakes.

Of course, there's plenty of shameless name-dropping, and in a small city like Dublin I suppose it's hard not to run into -- and hang out with -- the likes of Bono, John Banville, Gavin Friday and media mogul Gavin O'Reilly. And there's plenty of man-about-town shenanigans -- launch parties, press bashes, celebrity dinners, lots of drinks in the Shelbourne -- that provides a fascinating glimpse into a world few of us would ever get to experience.

But the book is much more than a memoir of one man's attempts to keep a supposedly hip magazine afloat. Because it is set in boomtown Dublin, it is also a searing indictment of the Celtic Tiger years, where everyone was out to boost their social standing by acquiring anything they could lay their hands on. Or, as one of The Dubliner's writers put it:

Ownership of a mansion to a new mobile phone to the latest line in trainers will help to assign you a position in the pecking order. The city has become like an American goldrush town where whoever held the biggest lump of shiny metal suddenly found himself the most popular man in the bar; the fact that his language was crude, his education minimal and his face dirty counted for nothing.

I'm not sure The Dublin Diaries will attract much interest beyond Irish shores, but if you admire people gutsy enough to follow a dream or are fascinated by the inner workings of the magazine trade, an industry which is in terminal decline, then there's plenty to like here. I found it an enjoyable read and got a few giggles out of it. I especially enjoyed the way in which he continually cut the over-inflated egos of so-called "celebrity chefs" down to size!

'Half A Life' by Darin Strauss

Non-fiction - hardcover; Beautiful Books; 208 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

As teenagers we all do things that are embarrassing, irresponsible and occasionally reckless. But spare a thought for American writer Darin Strauss, whose life was changed abruptly when he was just 18 and a month away from high-school graduation.

His book, Half A Life, recounts what it has been like to spend more than 20 years atoning for a tragic incident, summed up succinctly in the opening line of the memoir:

Half my life ago, I killed a girl.

It was May 1988, and Strauss was driving his father's car. A cyclist, on the road ahead of him, swerved across two lanes of traffic and collided with his vehicle, which was travelling at forty miles an hour.

Celine Zilke, the girl on the bike, was sixteen and will always be sixteen. And I knew her: Celine went to my school. She was an eleventh-grader. I see her playing field hockey in blue gym shorts -- Celine had been that lively, athletic type one always imagines in shorts. Or I see her settled in beside friends on the concrete benches just outside the cafeteria, or dashing off notes in the public-speaking class we took together.

The book examines Strauss's life -- from the accident to Celine's funeral and the resultant civil law case brought against him by Celine's parents -- in painstaking detail. It is unflinching in its honesty, often uncomfortably so.

And while he claims that his "moral and aesthetic codes argued against my writing an accident memoir", that is essentially what Half A Life is about. It is Strauss's way of dealing with the past, examining his guilt and taking responsibility for his actions.

While Strauss was found innocent of any wrong-doing right from the beginning, that doesn't stop his fellow students from shunning him at school. And it doesn't stop him from acting out the emotions and behaviour that he feels is expected of him. Sadly, his remorse plagues him right through his twenties and into his thirties. It is only when he gets married and becomes a parent that he is able to put things in perspective.

The book is told in quite a straightforward, occasionally punchy prose style and can be easily read in one or two sittings. It never feels like he is "creating an entertainment out of misfortune" (as he puts it), but I did find the woe-is-me attitude, while completely understandable, slightly tiresome.

Ultimately, this is a very sad book about what it is to be human, coming to terms with past actions, however tragic and painful they might be.

Half A Life won the 2010 National Book Circle Critics Award for Autobiography.

'Red Dust' by Ma Jian

Non-fiction - Kindle edition; CCV Digital; 336 pages; 2010. Translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.

I'm not a huge fan of travelogues, but I decided to read Red Dust based on the strength of Ma Jian's superb novel Beijing Coma and Max Cairnduff's excellent review.

I read it on my Kindle while in China last month, and found much of Jian's descriptions, particularly of places I had been such as the ancient city of Xi'an and the Ghost City of Fengdu, very authentic.

The book chronicles Jian's travels throughout China during the 1980s, a time in which travel for the average Chinese citizen was banned without the necessary paperwork.

He claims to go travelling because: "I want to see my country, every river, every mountain. I want to see different people, different lives. [...] I just want to know it, see it with my own eyes." But that is the sanitised version.

Before he hit the road, Jian was an official photographer for the propaganda department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. He spent most of his free time as an artist. His house, a "crumbling old shack", in Beijing was used by fellow creatives -- writers, painters, poets and dissidents -- as a secret meeting point.

He was labelled as a "questionable youth" by his bosses, who believed his "spare time activities" indicated he had been poisoned by "bourgeois Spiritual Pollution". He escaped the clutches of Party Officials waging their Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution by forging his own travel documents and heading for the desert. (Just as well, because within a matter of years more than a million people were arrested and nearly 200,000 executed as part of the Campaign.)

It was 1983 and he was 30 years old. He had hoped to find spiritual enlightenment along the way, but as most travellers are wont to discover, Jian ended up learning a great deal about his country -- good, bad and ugly -- and the people who lived in it.

He was on the move for three years before he decided to return to Beijing.

Initially he revels in the freedom that travel provided:

Men are like swallows, when autumn arrives they long to fly away. Life moves with the same rhythm as the sky and the earth. It changes as sun changes into moon and day into night. If they told me to return to Beijing now, I would charge straight into those ramparts.  I would rather crack my skull and die than go back to moulder in that dank city.

But later, after some close encounters and a constant struggle to earn enough cash to get by, he realises that freedom is not the be all and end all. "Walking through the wilds freed me from worries and fears, but this is not real freedom," he wrote. "You need money to be free."

While I found Red Dust an easy read and enjoyed discovering more about China through Jian's eyes, I did have some problems with the book.

The first -- which can be dismissed as my own fault, rather than the author's -- was Jian's narrative voice. I simply did not like it, because it often came across as arrogant and sexist (not dissimilar, in fact, to his fictional Dai Wei in Beijing Coma).

The second is simply the repetition of Jian arriving in a new place (usually broke and worried that the authorities will discover his papers are illegal), befriending someone, finding out about the local culture and then leaving. Once or twice is interesting, but when the bulk of the narrative is just relating a succession of these encounters, as different as each may be, it does become wearing. (Max Cairnduff's review also finds this a major failing.)

Of course, that's not enough to dismiss the book completely. There's a lot in Red Dust which provides food for thought, particularly as it is set just as China's economy was beginning to open up thanks to Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Jian thought that this would help his people, until he meets many rural folk who tell him otherwise. One chap says:

"A free economy won't make bicycles or sewing machines grow from the earth. [...] All the young men have left to find work in the cities. They come back at Spring Festival with new watches and big bags of clothes."

I'd love to know how opinions and attitudes have changed in the 25 years since Jian went on his travels, but sadly Jian will never be able to retrace his steps to find out. He's no longer welcome in his homeland and has been resident in London since 1999. His books are banned in China.

'The Grass Arena' by John Healy

Non-fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 272 pages; 2008.

The Grass Arena, a memoir by John Healy who spent 15 years living on the streets of London, will alter the way you view homeless people.

The book is written in what can only be described as schoolboy English, with sparse prose and an affinity for exclamation points. But this naive, un-educated voice, rings true and becomes rather endearing once you get into the rhythm of it.

It begins by detailing John's rather impoverished, ultra-religious and violent upbringing in which he sometimes lives with his parents in London and sometimes lives with his extended family in Ireland.

It then turns to the horror of his adult life lived on the margins of society. Here, in the "grass arena" he hangs out with all forms of low-life -- petty criminals, alcoholics, drug addicts -- and survives by his wits.

Much of his time is devoted to avoiding violence on the streets (nasty punch-ups fuelled by alcohol) and finding enough money -- either through begging or petty thievery -- to secure the next drink, whether it be beer, red wine or methylated spirits, he's not fussy (although he does confess that meths is "bastard stuff" which is "hard to get down first thing in the day -- any time for that matter".) 

Life is a blur of abject, hopeless drunkenness, broken by stints in prison, but underneath it all you get the very real sense that Healy desperately wants to escape this way of life. And, eventually, he does, by a rather surreal saviour: the game of chess, for which he has a particular talent.

This memoir isn't exactly a fun read, although it does have moments of high humour of the blackest variety, but it's an illuminating account of what it is like to be a member of an underclass spurned by society. And it details, almost lovingly, the camaraderie and sense of community which exists between those people who have no homes to go to.

The autobiography, first published in 1988, was made into an award-winning film by the BBC in 1991.

As an aside, I read this book back to back with MJ Hyland's This is How and was surprised at some of the similarities between the fictional Patrick Oxtoby and the very real John Healy: both suffer from severe tension in the upper back and neck that can only be alleviated through drink; both become alcoholics; and both eventually end up in prison.

To hammer the point home further, Oxtoby reads an unnamed book borrowed from the prison library which I believe can only be Healy's Grass Arena. I'm convinced MJ Hyland must have read it as part of her research for her novel.

'My Name is Number 4' by Ting-Xing Ye

Non-fiction - Kindle Edition; Doubleday Canada; 240 pages; 2010.

Ting-Xing Ye is a Chinese-Canadian author, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. My Name is Number 4, first published in 1997, is her heart-rending account of what it was like living in that country during that time.

In China, number 4 is regarded as an unlucky number (similar to the way we in the West regard 13), and for Ting-Xing Ye it could not be more true. Born in Shanghai in 1952, she was the fourth child (out of 5) and by the time she was in her early teens both her parents had died. She and her siblings -- two elder brothers, and an older and younger sister -- were then raised by her Great Aunt.

Unfortunately, because her father was a factory owner, all the children were branded as "capitalists" when the Red Guards took over. This meant much humiliation at school, where she was subject to verbal and physical abuse.

But what terrified me most was a new government policy, supposedly designed to relieve the pressure of overpopulation in the cities. One child from each family must move to the countryside and remain there for the rest of his or her life.

Ting-Xing does the honourable thing and volunteers to move to the country, even though her elder sister was technically the sibling who should have gone. Ting-Xing was given two choices: a rubber plantation on Hainan Island in the South China Sea, or to a prison farm, far north of Shanghai in Jiangsu Province. After her brother did some investigating and discovered that the rubber plantation was plagued by a "devastating outbreak of hepatitis", she chose the prison farm.

For the next six years, Ting-Xing lived and worked on the farm, which "had been set up in the early 1950s to put away political prisoners" but now housed other criminals, all male, whom had been charged with living "dissolute lifestyles". This presented Ting-Xing and her female companions with another threat -- sexual predation -- while trying to cope with a new life of hard work, humiliation and separation from friends and family.

Ting-Xing's account never wallows in self-pity, but she makes it clear that her deprivations were harsh and that she was, at times, subject to what we today know better as "sleep-deprivation torture used by many countries in espionage and war".

She makes few friends and spends what little free time she has teaching herself English, which pays off in the end, when, aged 22, she passed the entrance exam to Beijing University.

Sadly, the Kindle edition of this book seems to be missing the section I was most interested in: Xing-Ting's life post-prison. I wanted to learn of her life as a translator, her feudal-style marriage and later of her defection to Canada, where she married a Canadian and lives to this day. It was only upon reading the fine print, on the second-to-last page, that I realised this is an abridged edition designed for young adult readers -- which may partly explain the over-emphasis on menstruation throughout the book (teenage girls love that sort of thing) and the patronising glossary at the back explaining about the PLA, Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four.

Despite this, My Name is Number 4 is a good read in the sense that you really get a feel for what it must have been like to live a life of fear, deprivation and exile all in the name of Mao's Cultural Revolution. Xing-Ting Ye has an important story to tell, and she tells it well. It's just a pity that this edition wasn't the one I expected, but that's more the fault of the marketing than the author. I reckon teenage girls would love it.

'Almost There' by Nuala O'Faolain

 

Non-fiction - paperback; Riverhead Books; 288 pages; 2004.

I do love a good memoir, and after reading Nualo O'Faolian's Are You Somebody? last year (which I awarded five stars) I knew I just had to read the second part, Almost There.

Of course reading this book feels kind of spooky (and terribly sad), because O'Faolain, an Irish journalist, died of cancer four years after it was completed, and at the time of writing she would not have had the slightest inkling of what fate had in store. She writes fondly of looking forward to growing old with a new love and his young daughter, and there's a real sense of optimism about the future. Perhaps it's better that she didn't know what was just around the corner...

Almost There fills in the six years after O'Faolain's first memoir, which became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, was published in 1997. During this time she becomes a bit of a hermit, hiding away from the world in response to the breakdown of her 15-year relationship with Nell McCafferty that left her feeling emotionally raw, isolated and lonely. (Ironically, her relationship with Nell barely got mentioned in the first book, and it's much the same for the second. But O'Faolain does explains that she had not wanted to spoil a good relationship by putting it down on paper.)

The loneliness is compounded by a year living in Northern Ireland (she basically packed up her Dublin house overnight) to write a column about life north of the border for the Irish Times. It was an experiment which proved profoundly difficult for her and it was only when she moved to Manhattan, where she then pens her first novel, My Dream of You, that she begins to feel life is returning to some semblance of normality.

Most of the memoir is a kind of meandering look at how that initial publishing success changed her circumstances but didn't necessarily change her as a person: still psychologically damaged from her difficult childhood and grappling with the anger (mainly against her alcoholic mother) that this has caused; still unable to settle down with a man, but not afraid to pursue sordid love affairs.

I think the best thing about Almost There, aside from O'Faolain's beautiful writing and her unashamed pursuit of the truth, is the way in which she gives voice to so many other "late middle-aged" (she never uses the term elderly) women like her: hugely successful on the outside, with wonderful careers and enough money to live comfortably, but deeply lonely because they never married or had children. She is so honest about her hurt and her regret that it's difficult not to share the pain. However, O'Faolain doesn't wallow in self-pity and always tempers her pathos with dark-edged humour and fond memories of the good things that have happened to her. She knows when she is sounding like a spoilt child and is not afraid to admit it.

While not as wonderful as Are You Somebody? this is a moving account of one woman's search for meaning in her late middle-life. Before reading this one, I'd suggest reading her novel, My Dream of You, (if you haven't already) because she references it a lot, and you can very easily see how she mined the events of her own life for the fictional 50-year-old character she created.

'A Woman In Berlin' by Anonymous

 

Non-fiction - paperback; Virago; 311 pages; 2005.

It's true: the war is rolling towards Berlin. What was yesterday a distant rumble has now become a constant roar. We breathe the din; our ears are deafened to all but the heaviest guns. We've long given up trying to figure out where they are positioned. We are ringed in by barrels, and the circle is growing smaller by the hour.

So begins one of the most harrowing accounts of war-time Berlin you are ever likely to encounter. Indeed, the imminent war historian Antony Beevor, who writes the introduction to this edition, calls it "a war diary unlike any other...one of the most important personal accounts ever written". 

The diary begins on Friday 20 April 1945 and continues for just over two months until 22 June. It is written by an anonymous 34-year-old woman, whose husband is away fighting in the German Army. She has been bombed out of her own apartment and is now living in a furnished attic room owned by a former colleague, who has also been called up.

It chronicles the day-to-day struggle for survival in a city now under Russian occupation. We hear of the huge queues for food and water, the ransacking of government buildings in search of Nazi stockpiles, the constant fear that they will be bombed out of their homes. But the most shocking part of this book is the diarist's account of mass rape that was carried out by Russian soldiers.

Fortunately, she doesn't go into elaborate detail, but her thumbnail portraits of such barbarous events -- she was raped several times over the course of a few days -- are enough to fill the reader with horror. But this is an intelligent, well-educated woman, who, as a journalist had travelled the world and picked up numerous foreign languages along the way (including Russian), and so she adopts the most pragmatic approach that one could adopt when confronted with such brutality -- on Tuesday, 1 May 1945, she writes:

No question about it: I have to find a single wolf to keep away the pack. An officer, as high-ranking as possible, a commandant, a general, whatever I can manage. After all, what are my brains for, my little knowledge of the enemy language?

While A Woman in Berlin might sound like terribly depressing subject matter, it somehow doesn't feel that way when you read it. Yes, it's distressing and occasionally very dark, but the diarist is so practical, so free from self-pity and so bloody tenacious, that you find yourself being swept up by her life, cheering her along, hoping she'll come out the other side with her spirit and faculties intact. It helps, too, that the book is riddled with dark humour, such as this exchange between a friend she manages to track down on 21 May:

Ilse and I hastily exchange the first sentences: 'How many times were you raped, Ilse?' 'Four, and you?' 'No idea, I had to work my way up the ranks, from supply train to major.'

I also have to point out how terribly easy this book is to read. It feels very much like a novel, not a diary. She has such an eye for detail that she brings everything to life in beautiful descriptive passages, such as this one contained in her entry for 10 May:

All along the way we see debris left by the troops: gutted cars, burned-out tanks, battered gun-carriages. Occasional posters in Russian celebrating May Day, Stalin, the victory. Here, too, there are scarcely any people. Now and then some pitiful creature darts by -- a man in shirt sleeves, a woman with dishevelled hair. No one pays us much attention. A woman passes us, barefoot and bedraggled. She answers our questions -- 'Yes, the bridge is still there' -- and hurries away. Barefoot? In Berlin? I've never seen a woman in that condition before. The bridge is still blocked by a barricade of rubble; my heart is pounding as we slip through a gap.

And this, more startling, image contained in her entry dated Thursday, 26 April:

An image from the street: a man pushing a wheelbarrow with a dead woman on top, stiff as a board. Loose grey strands of hair fluttering, a blue kitchen apron. Her withered legs in grey stockings sticking out the end of the wheelbarrow. Hardly anyone gave her a second glance. Just like when they used to ignore the rubbish being hauled away. 

The publishing history and the "outing" of the anonymous author's identity is almost as interesting as the book itself. A Woman in Berlin was first published in an English translation in the US in 1954 and the UK in 1955. When a German language edition was published in 1960 it caused an uproar, because as Antony Beevor explains, "rape and sexual collaboration for survival were taboo subjects".  The author apparently claimed she did not want it published again in her lifetime. She died in 2001 and it was republished in 2003. You can find out more about her in this wikipedia entry.

'Are you Somebody?' by Nuala O'Faolain

Non-fiction - paperback; New Island Books (2nd edition); 264 pages; 2008.

I've read some extraordinary memoirs in recent years, all by professional writers -- Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, Amélie Nothomb's The Life of Hunger -- and this one, by Irish author, journalist and TV producer Nuala O'Faolain, is right up there with the best of them.

O'Faolain, who died last year aged 68 from cancer, was a household name in Ireland. Indeed, in the introduction to this edition, she writes that she was "fairly well known" but is quick to point out that she was "no star":

People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. Sometimes when I'm drinking in a lounge bar, a group of women, say, across the room begin to look at me, and send one of their number over to me, or when I'm in the supermarket someone who has just passed me by turns back, and comes right up to me and scrutinises my face. 'Are you somebody?' they ask.

By contrast, I know very little about O'Faolain outside of her wonderful novel My Dream of You, which I read earlier in the year and had been told was a thinly veiled biography. Having enjoyed it so much I figured I should try the "real" thing, which is how I came to read this memoir.

There's no doubt that O'Faolain knows how to write. There's also no doubt that she knows how to do so in a very candid way. There's no hedging her bets, or taking a softly-softly approach. It's all here, warts and all.

She was born one of nine children in 1940 "when nine was not even thought of as a big family among the teeming, penniless, anonymous Irish of the day". She viewed herself as a nobody, just an ordinary girl, in a country constricted by Catholicism, who would eventually be married and kept by a man. And yet, for most of Nuala's life, she rages against this stereotypical expectation and breaks as many social norms as she can.

Without going into too much detail, she moves in with a man she has not married (a huge no-no in Holy Catholic Ireland at the time) and later flees to England, where she forges a hugely successful academic and journalistic career. But along the way, despite her successful working life, there is something missing: a troubled past and estranged relationship with her family seems to keep her back (her father, a well-known Irish journalist, does not come off very well in this memoir, nor her mother, who turned to drink to numb the pain of a bad marriage). And then there's her promiscuity and search for "passion" which ultimately leaves her feeling rather lost and empty.

Surprisingly, for a woman so candid about her sexual desires, she gives scant regard to her partner of 15 years, the journalist Nell McCafferty and barely mentions her in this book, apart from describing the odd cosy holiday together. (Perhaps Nuala's second volume, entitled Almost There, may fill in some of these gaps.)

Are You Somebody? is about one woman's search for meaning, dealing with a past that you cannot leave behind and coming to terms with growing old. There's a sadness at the heart of this memoir, and a slow-burning rage, too, and perhaps just a smidgen of self-pity. But, ultimately, it's a powerhouse of a read, and you come away from it feeling as if you really got to know the lonely, flawed and hugely intelligent and brave woman who wrote it.