Love at first read

How to have a successful love life

If you are in an enviable relationship with a loving partner, you don’t need to read this post because it’s aimed at the rest of us, who are divorced, in a disappointing relationship, lonely, old, and out the romance game. Who, in fact, dislike this day and just ignore all of its strange, irritating trappings. I have a plan for you, dear lonely hearts: let me tell you the secret to enjoying a safe, sane, and totally controllable life-long love affair. And not a one-night stand either, but one that still delivers a reliable thrill, even after umpteen years, always ready and waiting faithfully for your return.

Believe me, anyone can play. All you need to do is find a book you love at first read, when you discover a voice, a world so new yet so achingly familiar that you have to buy it, rush home, and immerse yourself for the next three days. And after that, forever. That’s the kind of love I’m talking about and while I have a couple of oldies that I reread time and time again, I also recently discovered a new, difficult but rewarding love. To these three wizards of words I send this substack as an updated, weird kind of Valentine. Because I don’t just love the works; I tend to love the authors as well. It’s always a package deal for me.

Who are these lucky guys? They are the Canadian novelist Mordechai Richler, the Rumanian born novelist Gregor Von Rezzori and the poet/scientist/philosopher Iain McGilchrist. Yes, I know this is not a very ‘inclusive’ gallery since all are male and none are gay. They do not engage in cross dressing, do not dye their hair purple and do not pass out when you address them with the proper pronoun: he/him. I did try to find a woman for this Valentines Club but so far, no such lady has appeared. I regret that…

Let me tell you about Richler (1931-2001), who used to be one of the great literary lions, from a rabbinical Jewish family in Montreal, who has also spawned a brood of children all of whom write but not as well as he. They are good but simply don’t have that extra magic that makes me pick up my favourite novel, Barney’s Version when I have nothing else to read, feel down, need a chuckle or two and a reminder that life is essentially absurd and ‘nobody understands anybody’ as Barney has it. When I feel angry at getting old and being stupid and old, and wallowing in memories, possibly false. I am nothing like Barney, yet I totally identify with being irreverent and wrong about everything, like he is.

I can relate to Barney because I was a disreputable person who never realized her talents, though nobody has yet accused me of murdering my best friend, which is the leitmotif of the story. I have read almost everything Richler ever wrote, but this is the only title that has grabbed me for good. I have lost count of the rereads. He is long gone, but this book, also a somewhat disappointing movie, will live on. And what cements this odd coup de foudre is a much-quoted comment Richler made when he was living in London and often asked about Canada, his home and native land. Canada, he said, is an obscenely rich country governed by idiots. Plus ca change…

Gregor von Rezzori (1914-1998) is a biting satirist, and in his private life, an inveterate misfit. Like Richler, he was an outsider, and a sharp observer of societal idiocies. Born in Czernowitz in the Bukowina, a place that has disappeared into what is now Ukraine, Rezzori wrote primarily in German though he also spoke English, Rumanian, Yiddish, Italian and a few other languages with what he termed ‘fantastical fluency’. He initially wanted to be an artist, but that plan went off the rails due to chaotic private as well as global disruptions, like the First World War and a changing of the guard when the old Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed. He started by writing pop literature for a German magazine, eventually becoming a writer of seriously comic and satiric literature though by no means beloved by the Germans. His first big commercial success was a collection of comic tales from eastern Europe, Maghrebinische Geschichten, tales he had first absorbed from his illiterate nursemaid and later living in the Rumanian hinterland, a cultural stew of many ethnicities and languages he never forgot and which he says nourished his unique voice and storytelling style. This comic collection put him on the German literary map though his later works, The Death of my Brother Abel among them, didn’t get a favourable reaction. It wasn’t until he wrote Memoirs of an Anti Semite, in English, that his star began to rise again, with translations into all European languages. He also wrote a number of screenplays and even acted in several movies, such as the wonderfully silly Viva Maria, with Bardot and her nemesis, Jeanne Moreau. Oh what fun they had filming this thing!

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=viva+maria&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:f22607eb,vid:r6-nQ14u-Po

In fact, Rezzori did so many things it’s hard to arrive at any kind of literary opinion. My take is this: his two memoirs, Anecdotage and On My Trail, are fascinating and offer the reader a wider and deeper understanding of what happened in Europe beginning with the first world war than any history could possibly offer. He was there, he suffered dislocations, he even reported on the infamous Nuremburg Trials, and he is as honest and unsparing of himself as any memoirist I have ever read. His descriptions of what it was like to live through this tumultuous time without a valid citizenship, in an unhappy marriage and trying all the while to write is to be transported into a long-gone world. When I read his Memoirs, I realize that because I was born so much later, I was the lucky one. Whatever hardships I suffered; they were nothing compared to the massive disruptions of his life. And in spite of it all, he emerged, in old age, as the revered grand seigneur of European letters. Though in Germany, he never attained what we understand by ‘respectability’. And that was just fine by him. He preferred to be a literary bête noire. He was in fact your classic ‘bad boy’. And that’s another reason why I love him at a distance but forever.

And now, for a living author who couldn’t be more different from these two: the cuddly sage of Neuroscience, philosophy and poetry tucked away on the Isle of Skye but also everywhere on YouTube and in print, the astonishing Dr Iain McGilchrist. If you read my substacks, you already know that I fell hard for him last year when he appeared on a Jordan Peterson interview and basically changed the way I perceive the world with his book The Master and his Emissary and his Channel McGilchrist where he discusses his latest work, The Matter with Things, all the while apologizing for its biblical length—I am so ashamed but I just couldn’t make it shorter. He also asks the Big Questions and how they relate to the fact that practically all living beings including humans have a divided brain structure.

Reading him is demanding because he was not, according to him, writing for a general audience. But the overwhelming success of The Master taught him that he was, indeed, writing for us, the non-professionals after all. His thesis, that western society is in trouble because it is entirely left-brain dominant in how it views reality, has been proven correct. It’s not a simple thesis of left-brain bad and right brain good, as some critics would have it. It is, rather, a highly nuanced description of how we got to be left brain dominant and what the all to obvious results are. Among the most troubling is a refusal to admit mistakes, an arrogant dismissal of diverse points of view, and a downright hostile vilification of intuition, the body, imagination, context, and faith. And Love. The technocratic nightmare of the pandemic is a case in point. We’re currently battling to bring some much-needed balance back into our public sphere, one where the Right Brain is given its due instead of being dismissed. Once you see the world in these terms, there is no going back. McGilchrist is, in my estimation, that rarest of men: one whose mind is so capacious that it can roam across the disciplines that normally stay hermetically separate: from quantum physics to neuroscience to philosophy to literature. He is able to connect the Big Dots as few can. He even reads poetry, live, on his channel. No wonder I love this guy.

What can I say? I hope you find your own authors to love and cherish, so you too can enjoy Valentine’s Day Forever.