Culture

This, in my experience, has been completely unprecedented, and I doubt will ever happen again: three members of the same family reading the same book at the same time. We had to read the book in shifts: it was like waiting on the docks to hear the plight of Little Nell, or gathering together to read samizdat in the former Soviet Union. Even more extraordinary, having read this book I voluntarily went back and read all of the others in the series. Thirteen books by the same author: I’ve read more Lemony Snickets than I’ve read Iris Murdochs. For the uninitiated, among whom I proudly counted myself until the past few weeks, The End is the 13th and final instalment in a series of novels by the American author Daniel Handler, writing under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket.

In 1882, while on a lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde was surprised to find a copy of The Divine Comedy in a Nebraskan penitentiary. ‘Oh dear, who would have thought of finding Dante here?’ he marvelled. No doubt the inmates were supposed to be edified by Dante’s medieval epic of sin and salvation: ghastly retribution is meted out to sinners in the nine circles of Hell. However, if Dante speaks to our present condition, it is not because we fear damnation, but because he wrote the epic of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation. (A more recent sinner, Jeffery Archer, subtitled the three volumes of his prison memoirs ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Heaven’.

December, as far as children’s books are concerned, is the month of the hardback. For the rest of the year the young are fobbed off with soft covers, but the Christmas present book can be an altogether more substantial and permanent friend. This is true of picture books for the very young. Dimity Dumpty by Bob Graham (Walker Books, £10.99) is the story of Humpty Dumpty’s shy little sister, who saves his life when all the King’s horses and all the King’s men have failed, by taking off her T-shirt and bandaging what is delicately called ‘Humpty’s leakage’. The illustrations of the family’s life in the circus as ‘The Tumbling Dumpties’ are delightful.

In 1958, half way through the century here recorded, the late and much lamented National Book League put on the first ever antiquarian book fair, with 24 members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association exhibiting. ‘We hope,’ wrote The Book Collector, ‘that the ABA will be encouraged to make this an annual event.’ It did, and in the process transformed the way old books were bought and sold (a fact unnoticed here). It became the custom for some celebrity (or what passed for one) formally to open the fair. One year it fell to my turn. I had noticed that all previous openers had always said, sententiously, how much they owed to the booksellers they knew.

The seemingly unstoppable rise of the exhibition catalogue happily does not mean that nothing else gets published, and my selection of glossy delights to drive away the Boxing Day blues has more than its fair share of goodies that were not born in museums. The Royal Tombs of Egypt by Zahi Hawass (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) is a spectacular case in point, which not only contains numerous gorgeous photographs of the paintings and carvings within them, but also some remarkable six-page fold-outs. Hawass is above all concerned with the subject-matter and meaning of these decorations, which were based upon such texts as the Book of the Dead, and proves to be an exemplary guide to their intricate iconography.

The Prix Goncourt was awarded, as of right, to Jonathan Littell for Les Bienveillantes (Galli- mard). Les Bienveillantes, the Kindly Ones, is the name usually given to the Furies. The narrator of this masterly novel, Max Aue, the director of a lace factory, is writing his account of the second world war, in which he served on the wrong, i.e. German side. Notable for his sane and reasonable tone of voice the narrator divulges, without much compunction, that he is a former Nazi, an SS officer who was present in all the main theatres of war, initially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, and latterly in a devastated Berlin. He is also notable for his imperturbable sense of right and wrong, or rather his conviction that these terms are implausible. The gas chambers? On whom do we lay the blame?