Advantages: Thought provoking... Disadvantages: ...hm, I'm thinking about it....
...If a happily married woman lies awake at night next to her husband visualising another man making love to her, is she being unfaithful to her husband or just indulging in fantasy?
Thought provoking questions similar to this are addressed in ‘The Lovers’: a novel that weaves love’s many guises into an impenetrable tapestry which perfectly expresses the pleasure and torment injected into a person who is tempted to bite into the forbidden fruit that is carnal desire. The result is a judicious cross-examination of ‘love’, ‘sex’ and ‘happiness’ from male and female perspectives written without bias.
Set in modern day Paris, we are introduced to Gilles and Pauline who, after he watches her drop her son off at school, plucks up the courage to ask Pauline to meet him for a clandestine dinner and inspite of herself she agrees. Until...
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Advantages: Stunning insights into unknown places Disadvantages: Could do without the laddish element
...Not being a Times reader, and even if I were: not being a TV or restaurant critique reader, I may never have come across A.A. Gill - except maybe via Jeremy Clarkson (in whom I take a shameful juvenile delight!). Mr Gill, I'm sure, is suitably albeit insignificantly pleased that I came to his words without his friend & sometime co-author's assistance.
Jeremy, I'm equally sure, couldn't give a whatsit.
"AA Gill is away" is a collection of traveller's tales from the years 1995 to 2001. As reproduced magazine pieces they are necessarily short, and self-contained. They are, to steal a word from my musician friends, tight.
They are full of humour and rancour and personal insight and - just occasionally - incomprehension. They are unapologetically personal, political, take-it-or-leave-it-this-is-my-take-on-it journalism. And some...
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...It's no good. I need to find fault with Mr Gill. My reputation as an objective reviewer will be totally shot if I simply fall in the traditional "I'm not worthy" pose at his feet, which is what I felt I did with my last attempt to review a collection of his articles. [See: A A Gill Is Away]
I do try. I fail.
Except that maybe the cover photograph of Mr Gill pretending to be Wilfred Thesiger - stunning and gorgeous though it (he) is - is slightly misleading.
If you've ever read the man in newsprint, you'll know that he has nothing of the panache of the earlier writer-explorers. Quite apart from whatever loss of kudos you get from hanging around with Mr Clarkson (a splendid gent in his own way, but not quite explorer-cool) - Gill is man enough to admit when he is, not to put to fine a point on it, sh*t scared.
Hemingway...
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29.12.2003
22.03.2006
