Living for Disco

Years ago, I worked for a small travel agency. It was my second job in London. I hadn’t meant to move on from my first job so very quickly, but they made me redundant after three months, and so I had little say in the matter.

The place was in Putney – a hideous journey from where I lived, way across the other side of the city. We worked in a small office for a man who, when he interviewed me, didn’t let me get a word in edgeways and had breath so toxic that it made paint bubble on the walls.

One of our colleagues was a compulsive liar, who ironically ended up engaged to, and eventually estranged from another compulsive liar, who convinced her that he was a Harrier pilot. He’d call her up to tell her that he was off on missions, and that if he didn’t come back to remember that he loved her. She uncovered his duplicity when she spoke to his mother for the first time and found out that he was actually a cashier at the local branch of the Halifax Building Society.

Anyway, there were three of us there that were roughly sane and worth socialising with, or so we felt. One of them is still a very good friend now – one of my bridesmaids in fact. The other I lost touch with after she married a guy who didn’t like me, and whom I thought was an idiot, not least because just before the wedding he cheated on her with a winsome cello player who happened to be his secretary.

Before our estrangement, however, I went round there for dinner one evening. We talked a lot about books, because we all loved to read. I remember recommending a book to my friend’s fiancé, and he immediately dismissed it because, I kid you not, it was too modern. He said that there were just too many wonderful books written by people born before the turn of the 20th Century to bother with anything written by anyone born more lately than that.

Of course this sparked a rather passionate debate. I thought that he was missing out on some classics in the making, as well as many other books that are simply enjoyable. He thought all these Johnny-come-latelys were merely standing on the shoulders of giants, and were therefore not worth spending the time on.

It’s ironic therefore that the book he thrust up on me, and insisted I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who was born in 1918. “Read that”, he said “and tell me I’m wrong about your modern fluff. Read some classics, for god’s sake, you uneducated buffoon. Don’t you know that pain, injustice and drudgery are the cornerstones of great literature? ” I asked him if he’d ever read any Jane Austen, but he seemed to think that beneath him too. I still wonder if he ever got any enjoyment out of reading, or whether he was just a masochist. He probably used to beat himself round the head every day with Finnegans Wake for chuckles.

Anyway, to be honest, his description of the book put me off. It just sounded so… grim. This wouldn’t normally stop me reading a book, although anything with the word gulag in it should be approached with extreme caution, and easy access to vodka.

What has stopped me from reading it for the last 10 years is sheer bloody mindedness. I still have the pristine copy he gave me, unopened. I just can’t bear to have to admit that fact to myself that I would like it, because he was so bloody condescending.
And also an idiot.

So here we are, and One Day in the Life is on the list. And I own it. So I guess I will be reading it soon. He did ask me to let him know what I thought of it, so I’ll just have to hope that he stumbles across my review.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 9:57 am and is filed under 1001 books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.