More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby Page A

the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 , James Shapiro says that Montaigne took “the unprecedented step of making himself his subject,” thus enabling Shakespeare to produce a dramatic equivalent, the soliloquy. Of course, you can overstate the case for Montaigne’s innovative genius. It’s hard to imagine that, in the five-hundred-odd years since the essays were first published, some other narcissist wouldn’t have had the idea of sticking himself into the middle of his prose. Montaigne invented the personal essay like someone invented the wheel. Why he’s still read now is not because he was the first, but because he remains fresh, and his agonized agnosticism, his endearing fumbles in the dark (he frequently ends a thought or an opinion with a disarming, charming “But I don’t know”), become more relevant as we realize, with increasing certainty, that we don’t have a clue about anything. I’d be surprised and delighted if I read a richer book in the next twelve months.
    And then, as if Montaigne’s hand were on my shoulder, I discovered Emily Fox Gordon’s Book of Days , a collection of personal essays. I had read a nice review of them in the Economist , but had presumed that they’d be nicely written, light, amusing, and disposable, but that’s not it at all: these are not blogs wrapped up in a nice blue cover. (And is it OK, given the Believer ’s no-snark rule, to say that some blogs are better than others? And that one or even two have no literary merit whatsoever?) There are jokes in Book of Days , but the writing is precise, the thinking is complicated andoriginal, and just about every subject she chooses—faculty wives, her relationship with Kafka, her niece’s wedding—somehow enables her to pitch for something rich and important. If you are interested in writing and marriage—and if you’re not, then I don’t know what you’re doing round here, because I got nothing else, apart from kids and football—then she has things to say that I have never read elsewhere, and that I will be thinking about and possibly even re-reading for some time to come. In Sarah Bakewell’s introduction to How to Live , she quotes the English journalist Bernard Levin: “I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put the book down at some point and say with incredulity, ‘How did he know all that about me?’” Well, I haven’t yet had that experience with Montaigne, probably because in my admittedly limited excursions so far, I’ve been looking for the smutty bits, but I felt it several times while I was reading Book of Days . “The Prodigal Returns,” the essay about Gordon’s niece’s wedding, turns into a brilliant meditation on the ethics and betrayals of memoir-writing, and contains the following:
    What do I enjoy? Not staying in hotels, apparently. Not gluttony, not parties, not flattery, not multiple glasses of white wine. What I seem to want to do—“enjoy” is the wrong word here—is not to have experiences but to think and tell about them. I’m always looking for excuses to avoid sitting down at my desk to write, but I “enjoy” my life only to the extent that even as I’m living it, I’m also writing it in my mind.
    Well. Obviously that’s not me, in any way whatsoever. I’m an adventurer, a gourmand, a womanizer, a bon viveur , a surfer, a bungee jumper, a gambler, an occasional pugilist, a Scrabble player, a man who wrings every last drop from life’s dripping sponge. But, you know. I thought it might chime with one or two of you lot. Nerds. And it certainly would have chimed with Montaigne.
    I’m afraid I am going to recommend yet another epic poem about the Mau Mau uprising—this time Adam Foulds’s extraordinary and pitch-perfect The Broken Word . It will occupy maybe an hour of your life, and you won’t regret a single second