What book is making Caryl Phillips reevaluate how much he knows about the people closest
What Book…
Novelist, playwright and essayist, Caryl Phillips
… are you reading now?
I’VE just re-read Waiting Room – the late Australian writer Gabrielle Carey’s heartbreakingly honest memoir about her complicated life with her dying mother.
How much can we really know about those supposedly closest to us? As it turns out, precious little.
However, Carey questions, speculates, worries and reminds us that when we decide that it’s time to ask the important questions, it’s often too late.
… would you take to a desert island?
I’ve been meaning to read Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets. It’s a long book, so it would keep me occupied; and it’s an oral history weaving together a tapestry of different voices, so I would have plenty of company.
I’ve dipped in and out of it, and been fascinated, but always put it aside for when I have a good stretch of solitary time.
Phillips discovered the transportive magic of reading in the Famous Five
…first gave you the reading bug?
I think Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories, in which the kids always outsmarted the adults. There were many books in the series, so it was a form of juvenile binge-reading.
Looking back, I can see that it must have been strange for the librarian to witness a black working-class northern kid coming into the library week after week to take out books about privileged upper middle-class white southern kids.
But part of the magic of reading is how we can effortlessly enter the worlds of people who are not, in any way, ourselves, and fully identify with their lives.
… left you cold?
Way too many books to list. If a book doesn’t grip me on the first page, I seldom continue. Life’s too short to punish oneself with writing that’s not connecting.
These days, I am no longer an innocent reader, so I am principally looking at books for the form and structure. This being the case, I can quickly tell what’s working for me and what’s not.
Books that work, I often return to year after year. This includes writing by Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shusaku Endo and William Trevor among many others.
Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips (Bloomsbury £16.99) is available now from the Mail Bookshop