After a Funeral [Hardcover]

Diana Athill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1986

This is the story of how and why a talented writer came to kill himself. When Diana Athill met the man she calls Didi, an Egyptian in exile, she fell in love instantly and out of love just as fast. Didi moved into her flat, they shared housework and holidays, and a life of easy intimacy seemed to beckon. But Didi's sweetness and intelligence soon revealed a darker side - he was a gambler, a drinker and a womaniser, impossible to live with but impossible to ignore. With painful honesty, Diana Athill explores the three years they spent together; a period that culminated in Didi's suicide - in her home - an event he described in the journals he left for her to read as "the one authentic act of my life".

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 158 pages
• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields; 1st Ed. edition (November 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0899194540
• ISBN-13: 978-0899194547
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,025,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in 1917 and educated at Oxford University, DIANA ATHILL has written several memoirs, including "Instead of a Letter," "After a Funeral," "Somewhere Towards the End," and the New York Times Notable Book "Stet," about her fifty-year career in publishing. She lives in London and was recently appointed an Officer of the British Empire.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ways of Living, Ways of Surviving, October 19, 2000

By 

Tom Adair - See all my reviews

This review is from: After a Funeral (Hardcover)

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.