WHAT BOOK?
…are you reading now?
A PARISIAN for the past 15 years I read as much in French as in English, and following a recent bereavement I’ve been finding some solace in Annie Ernaux’s Une Femme. The novelist’s vivid memories resurrect her mother, a no-nonsense shopkeeper whose feisty facade hid a lifetime’s insecurity.
The prose is spare, quietly affectionate and also revealing throughout, so that you come away with a renewed sense of the unsuspected depth and complexity in every person.
…would you take to a desert island?
MY SIGNED edition of Les Murray’s New Selected Poems. Australia’s perennial Nobel Prize contender until his death in 2019, Murray was also autistic. His beautiful, gloriously neurodivergent work gave me the confidence to pursue my own career in writing, and I’m immensely proud to be able to claim him as a mentor.
…first gave you the reading bug?
SINCE childhood I’ve perceived words and numbers as possessing colours, shapes, textures and emotions (a neurological phenomenon scientists call synaesthesia) and remember my amazement the first time I opened a dictionary. Pages that flashed bright white with Hs, others that glittered with Ks, some were red with Rs — a darker and moodier red than the letter A.
This was, of course, before I discovered novels and poetry, but that early awe at the magical pull of words has never left me.
…left you cold?
THE Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, by Oliver Sacks. Much as I admire his body of work, I have a problem with his representations of autism. There’s a chapter where the doctor meets autistic twins who can calculate the day of the week for any date going back centuries.
Alas, we learn next to nothing about the men beyond these intriguing facts, because Sacks’s customary empathy fails him completely.
He sees only ‘a sort of grotesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee’, and ‘absurd little professors’.
Such wrong-headed cliches are harmful and hurtful. They ignore the many rich inner lives on the spectrum that Sacks, for all his gifts, could not comprehend.
NiNe Minds: inner Lives On The Spectrum by Daniel Tammet (Wellcome Collection, £20)is out now.