Customer Reviews

Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir

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This book isn't only valuable or interesting because we learn about Athill's life; rather, it helps readers consider their own lives in (for me, anyway) a broader perspective. What will one's last few years be like? The book is not morbid for a moment. Athill explores her feelings about her feelings themselves and changes to her body, abilities, interests, and even the world. Some regrets. some joyful memories, some accidental successes and failures as well as purposeful ones. How will we view our own run through this lifetime? There's no disguising the fact that typically one's last several years are characterized by physical decline; true for everyone who doesn't die too young. No moaning and complaining here. This book was inspiring for me and influences how I perceive my senior years. They can be only as pleasant as I make them. I recommend it for retrospection and to help one's adjustment to aging.

I was disappointed by this book. I found nothing in it that was in any way moving or uplifting. It brought no tear to my eye, caused no gasp of shock or surprise, no smile, no chuckle. The author's stated intention was to write a book about falling away into old age, but much of it is concerned with her bedroom adventures, the famous authors she knew and the publication of her own books.

Athill reveals herself as self-centred and solipsistic. She is always right, and devoid of what Tolstoy called 'gentle enquiring doubt'. Although she refers to friends, relations and literary acquaintances, not one of them is described with any deep, human affection. This is particularly true of her male friends. Although over a long period of time (into her sixties) she needed to have men in her bed, she seems to have been unwilling or unable to take on board Kant's dictum that we should treat people as ends in themselves rather than as a means to an end.

Athill makes virtues of promiscuity and not watching television. She takes the naive consequentialist view that it doesn't matter if a woman has an affair with a married man provided the married man's wife doesn't find out. She tells us that when Paul, her first suitor, jilted her, the stuffing was knocked out of her - but it doesn't seem to occur to her, when embarking on an affair with a married man, that his wife might find out and have the stuffing similarly knocked out of her, or that what he tells her about his wife might not been completely true.

White men are written off quite early in Athill's life when she decides that she prefers black male flesh to white, the implication of which is that she knows what ALL white men are like and has decided that ALL black men are nicer than they. Such willingness to argue from the particular to the universal is common among girls of sixteen but unbecoming of a ninety-year-old doyenne of literary London.

At the beginning of the book, Diana expresses regret that she had never owned a pug dog, and that she will never live to see a potted fir tree grow to maturity. A Freudian psychoanalyst would make much of this. At the end of the book, she avers that there are `no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer'. She finds herself left with `nothing but a few random thoughts'.

The tragedy of Diana's life is that she seems to have missed out on that wonderful experience of bonding emotionally and being completely at one with another human being. Of her married West Indian boyfriend, Sam, she writes `We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed, because we had very little in common apart from liking sex [...] the really important thing we had in common was that neither of us had any wish to fall in love or to become responsible for someone else's peace of mind. We didn't even need to see a great deal of each other. We knew that we would give each other no trouble.' Lasting relationships, commitment, deep emotional attachment - all these apparently come under the heading Trouble for Athill. When Barry, her companion of forty years' standing, falls ill and becomes incontinent, she congratulates herself on being able to clear up the mess (did she really have to tell us all about that?), but gives no indication that she is glad to look after him out of love or human affection.

I found her reflections on what it is like to face up to death at the age of eighty-nine particularly irritating. Having myself faced death on a daily basis (as a Fleet Air Arm pilot), and having lost good friends in their twenties and thirties in air accidents, I was not impressed by Athill's pseudo-courageous comments about `coming to terms with death'.

Athill's prosaic attempts at poetry would not win prizes in a competition if she submitted them under pseudonym - but would no doubt win first prize and a column in the Guardian if it became known that they were by Diana Athill. And that, I'm afraid, applies to the whole book. Athill freely admits that had she been a publisher to whom someone had submitted her books Stet and Yesterday Morning, she would probably have rejected them. Her admission reduces her view of authorship to little more than an exercise in literary self-gratification. One is left with the impression that the person who enjoys her books more than anyone else is herself.

One would have thought that a book by a leading editor would have been better edited. While this Granta edition is beautifully printed with an excellently designed dust jacket, at least four printer's errors jumped out of the page at me (a couple of typos and two instances where square brackets were used) and a couple of passages would undoubtedly have been tidied up by Diana Athill had they occurred in one of the books I submitted to her. (Although the book is priced at £12.99, I was able to get it from Amazon for under £7.)

I have, finally, to declare an interest, for it was Diana Athill who accepted my first novel, The River Running By, which was published with fanfares and great enthusiasm by André Deutsch Ltd in 1981 (it was The Bookseller's book of the month). Diana was a superb editor and I can never thank her enough for what she taught me about cutting and polishing my work. When I submitted my second novel The Raging of the Sea, which ran to over 600 pages, Diana read it and accepted it within four days. It was published by Deutsch in 1984, and my third novel, The Believer, also edited by Diana, was published by Deutsch in 1985. However, I was then head-hunted by Felicity Bryan (she pretends not to know me now!), another doyenne of literary London, who took me away from André Deutsch and gave me to Weidenfeld & Nicholson, who commissioned me to write Armada. André was furious, and I suspect that Diana Athill's remarks about loyalty and André's anger about writers who left their list may refer at least in part to myself. André desperately wanted a knighthood or a peerage, but he only got a CB. Whether my novel The Raging of the Sea (which was most unpopular with the Royal Navy) had anything to do with it, I don't know, but there are indications that there may have been a link. For a while, I regarded Diana Athill as a true friend, unaware that loyalty was not one of her favourite virtues. Had I known that, perhaps I would not have been so surprised to receive her final letter to me, in which her parting shot was, `Sod him and all who sail in him' - a remark which seems to me to sum up her attitude to men.

If you need cheering up after reading Somewhere Towards the End (and perhaps reassuring that I am not a disgruntled, male chauvinist pig) I would recommend Fay Weldon's delightful Auto Da Fay, which I think is about as good as autobiography gets.





The River Running By
The Raging of the Sea
The Believer
A Good Boy Tomorrow: Memoirs of A Fundamentalist Upbringing
Jannaway's MutinyIota: God as Nature, Nature as God

I have a soft spot in my heart for this author. I attended one of her author events in Hampstead once and enjoyed her musings very much. Yet I was so disappointed in this book that I wish I had left well enough alone and had only the Diana Athill of that evening in my memory.

Only if you would enjoy reading exhaustive accounts of the author's "friends with benefits" stories will you find this book engaging. Really, at the end of one's life is that all there is to talk about? If so, that's pretty discouraging.

I am glad the author finds solace in many facets of her life, such as gardening and reading, that are not hobbled by the physical limitations of advanced age. But the joy she finds in these pursuits didn't stir anything in me. Perhaps contentment is difficult to write about with passion.

The one thought I'll take away with me is that aging is not kind to your feet and walking becomes progressively more painful. I'll use her warning to more actively enjoy this ability now. And I hope to be able to put it to good use again on the Heath some day.

I first became acquainted with the writing of Diana Athill in "Stet," her insider's look at her 50+ years of working with the acclaimed British publisher Andre Deutsch and editing the writings of Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipul, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and other now-famous authors.

In "Somewhere Toward the End," Athill approaches the onset of her nineties with an amusing and deeply personal memoir about the ups and downs of old age.

Athill's insights into what's likely to lie over the hill intrigue me, especially when they direct my sights to aspects of growing old I'd not thought much about, if at all. For example, just when you reach that age where you've promised yourself you'd give up the car keys, your feet give out. Or the happy discovery that you've still got it in you to learn how to become good at something entirely new and unrelated to what you'd made a career of. Or that you'd finally reached the age where it's permissible to be a curmudgeon. Or belatedly come to the realization that the good family genes you'd lucked into and always figured would give you a good shot at living long and then leaving this world without much of a fuss almost always come with a deeply devoted daughter attached to smooth the way (a key ingredient she lacks, as do I. Oops. )

As I write this, Diana Athill's in her mid 90s and I'm looking forward to her next book "Letters to a Friend," which is getting excellent reviews in Britain, but is not yet available here. In the meantime, I recommend her 45-minute 2004 interview on the BBC's "Desert Island Discs". I've inserted a link in the comment below.

This is one of my favorite books. Athill is a wonderful writer - direct, clear language, great sense of humor, and one senses that she is unfailingly honest. She is wholly individual, equally enthusiastic recalling gardening and sexual highlights of her life. A riveting, unsentimental but beautiful portrait of a deep thinker somewhere towards the end. Hopefully not too close.

Athill may be approaching 90, but in clear precise prose she explores aging in an intelligent, fiercely honest and original way. She's like a refreshingly interesting dinner partner. I'm disappointed her other books aren't availabe on kindle.

If you are looking for a serious, perhaps even profound meditation on our human condition, especially as we age and suffer from disease and physical challenges, this is absolutely not the book for you. This book has little respect for its readers; rather, its readers are viewed with a Machiavellian coldness (as the writer viewed her various lovers, writers, etc. -- as chess pieces in her personal, hermetically sealed game).

If you are looking for a collection of incoherent, self-righteous ramblings penned by an aging middle-class narcissist (who abuses the memoir form merely to justify her every impoverished, unethical life decision) then this is the book for you. The writing itself is mundane, often pedantic in tone, and disjointed. The young, naive members of the literati reviewed the book well (mainly because they have no real experience of these things). Older readers, especially readers who have suffered through any serious life events, will find the writer's total lack of philosophical nuance and depth immensely disappointing.

Read books by Buddhist authors or serious memoirists and save yourself the effort. The author of this ugly little tome wastes pages waxing on about her affair with a married man (a West Indian man, as she refuses to do to with white men) and why this affair was perfectly acceptable. She worries about whether or not she should order various sorts of vegetable or decorative bric-a-brac for her tidy little English garden and she scolds us with her view that all life is meaningless and of course no God exists (somehow experience has made her even more certain about the big questions rather than more humble and open -- this fact alone shows she is no scholar, in any sense). Her world is neat and narrow and consequently small and shallow in every sense and certainly of no interest to a reader searching for a thoughtful exploration of life's most serious questions.

Athill can write and does so intimately and candidly to tell us how she experiences her aging body and how others view her.