Hugo Gryn, Albert S. Lindemann, and Adrienne Rich

 

Chasing Shadows by Hugo Gryn, with Naomi Gryn, Penguin Books (2001).

My mother's husband used to listen to Hugo Gryn on Radio 4 and admired his calm, compassion and restraint when talking about the Holocaust.  I bought this book for him - in the mistaken belief that everyone wants to read the biographies of people they admire.  Really I think, it was me that wanted to read it, but it was during the non-reading period of my life, so it has sat on the bookshelves ever since; a sort of aspiration.  I was inspired to dig it out again after reading The Hare With the Amber Eyes, recently.

    I did very much enjoy it.  I have to say that the beginning, which focuses on Gryn’s family history and early childhood, didn’t particularly grip me.  There was something very lovely though, in his portrayal of the Jewish community of Berehovo, where he grew up; particularly in its communal inter-dependence, and it’s focus on learning.  I’d like to be able to say the same about my family, although I suspect for us, as for a lot of people, formal learning comes to seem like a young person’s game.  In Gryn’s case too, I suspect I am idealizing – for by learning, I think he is referring for the most part to a quite narrowly religious study.  Nonetheless, I do very much admire (and aspire to) the idea of continual learning and study.

    Much of the early part of the book is made up of funny stories about his childhood and his relatives and he makes frequent use of exclamation marks! – which makes him seem warm and open, but also old-fashioned and maybe limited as a writer.  Clearly though, as Nazi policies begin to affect Gryn and his family directly, his writing takes on what is becoming the familiar tone of testimony – witness being borne to something horrendous.  I suppose the nearest thing I have to compare it to is the first part of Primo Levi’s book, If This Is A Man.

    For me, there is something very different about Gryn’s account though.  He seems freer, more resilient, even strangely light-hearted at times.  I think this is down to several things – his youth, for example.  I think I read that he was 15 when he was liberated, at the end of the war.  Perhaps because of his youth, there were people in positions of power in the camps who took to him, and tried to help him out occasionally (e.g. p.221).  He also writes about smuggling himself out of the brick factory in Berehovo, where the Jewish people had been detained prior to being taken to concentration camps, and then smuggling himself back in again, having dug up a small stash of bank notes he had buried in the garden before his family were taken away (p.152).  He wanders around observing people and asking what they’re up to (p.148), and at Liberose, the labour camp he went to after Auschwitz, he talks about occasionally being able to find some secure spot during the day and hiding out for several hours (p.230).  Certainly such possibilities never arose in Levi’s account.

    There’s a measure of personality difference too though.  As noted earlier, Gryn comes across as warm and open, a teller of funny stories alongside the somber ones, and these don’t stop altogether on his family’s internment.  He also has a habit of taking time to appreciate the comparatively pleasant moments – although sometimes this comes across rather strangely.  For example, he talks about when his family were loaded into the train to Auschwitz: ‘We were the first to get in, and secured a corner.  Most of the people in the wagon were friends of ours and we were confident that we would come to no clashes, though nobody entertained illusions about any pleasantness.

    ‘When everybody was inside, gendarmes came round and shut the doors. As it was still early afternoon, the light coming through the windows was quite sufficient, and soon everybody was preparing to settle down.’ (p.168) It sounds almost genteel.  

    Then his description of his first shower at Auschwitz: ‘speaking for myself, it was the first thing I really enjoyed.  A hot shower!  I washed myself and then Dad’s back, and Dad in turn rubbed my back.  This went on for a few minutes until suddenly the water stopped, but before we had time to say ‘Oh, dear!’ a fresh shower of ice cold water came pouring down.  That was hell!’ (p.179-80)

    His inadvertent discovery of, and near escape from, the gas chamber (p.190) sounded a little disingenuous, retrospectively staged.

    But the strength of the book I thought, came partly in the firsthand account that he gives, and partly also in his later reflections which his daughter (who published the book after his death) collected at the end.  Indeed, if you think – as I did initially – that Gryn didn’t really seem to experience the horrors that others did, the last couple of chapters will change your mind.  He talks for example, of being party to the killing of one particularly sadistic SS guard (p.235) and of another guard being caught and strung up in the courtyard outside the hospital after liberation, by ‘some of the boys’ – presumably liberated prisoners. (p.242-3)

    In the final chapter, he talks about the difficulty of maintaining self-respect, and therefore surviving the experience emotionally.  He also refers to the difficulty of believing in one’s own innocence, which I thought at first was a reference to survivor’s guilt – something he also talks about.  I think though, that actually he was referring to a different type of guilt – the kind one may be made to feel when accused and imprisoned of something, but no self defence is possible and no one else steps forward to intervene.  ‘Being in slave labour camps after Auschwitz,’ he writes, ‘gave me a measure of breathing space.  I had periods of reflection, especially about guilt – and one early realization was that I was not guilty.  I knew that I was innocent and that, contrary to appearances, it was our gaolers who were the guilty ones.  It was a conviction that I never lost, even though everything around us was designed to convince us otherwise.’ (p.249) I don’t think I ever considered this before. Nazi Germany seems such a clear case of evil versus innocence.  That those who were persecuted were ever in doubt about this never crossed my mind.

    Gryn also addresses the question of how to explain the Holocaust if one believes in God, which seems almost impossible to answer.  But Gryn came to his own understanding.  ‘People sometimes ask me ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’  I believe that God was there Himself – violated and blasphemed.  The real question is ‘Where was man in Auschwitz?’ (p.251) 

    The impression one is left with at the end of the book is of Gryn’s great moral conviction and courage – no so much in surviving physically, but in his emotional survival and strength, and his ability to address the issue, and to face Holocaust deniers, in the years since.

Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, by Albert S. Lindemann, Cambridge University Press (2000).

When I was at university, I did a module on anti-Semitism, and this was the key text.  As far as I remember, they stopped short of insisting that everyone read it – stating simply that certain chapters would be up for discussion on certain days.  I remember at the time, being incredibly impressed by it (I bought it, didn’t I?), but at the same time finding the idea that I could read a whole, large, densely-academic book for a single module, quite impossible.  It wasn’t only that we had various modules (all with their own long book lists), and only a matter of days to get the required reading done, but also that I was living alone for the first time – struggling with loneliness and enforced sociability with people I didn’t have much in common with, and unfamiliar practicalities such as feeding myself, laundry, cleaning, managing my own time and money.  For most of my time at college, I think the major portion of my energy went into such mundane things.  Looking back, it’s clear that reading this should have been non-negotiable – and I should have read a whole lot more besides!  But, better late than never I suppose.

    Albert Lindemann enters into this subject extremely cautiously, as if into a minefield, whilst at the same time clearly having some vexations of his own to vent.  The field is marred, he argues, by a lack of scholarly thoroughness.  Looking at some of the late nineteenth century writers for example, who have apparently been presented as the predecessors of the Nazis for their antisemitic pronouncements, he argues that their positions were more nuanced than previously suggested.  Many of them would have been horrified by the thought that violence against Jewish people might in any way have been considered justifiable.

    In particular, Lindemann takes issue with two ideas that he says characterize previous scholarship.  Firstly, the idea that antisemitism is a completely irrational ethos, entirely divorced from reality, and usually found in people who have no contact at all with Jewish people.  Secondly, the idea that talking about ‘the rise of the Jews’ is somehow dangerous, and plays into the hands of antisemites.  On the contrary, he says, Germany did have a large number of Jews compared to countries like Britain and France; as a group, Jews did do well in the late nineteenth century; they were overrepresented in particular professions.

    The picture that arises from Lindemann’s analysis of pre-1914 Germany and its Jewish population was, for me, entirely new.  He describes a quite lively debate over the issue of Jewish assimilation, and a certain confidence, even arrogance, and a spirit of criticism among Jewish writers which caused much irritation among some of their Gentile counterparts.  Those Jewish responses to antisemitism that I have seen have always centred around the horror of the Holocaust, so it was fascinating to see a different perspective.

    It was interesting, (and often quite embarrassing) reading the marginal notes I wrote as a student.  One of the few things I agree with my twenty-year-old self about is that Lindemann’s discussion of antisemitism, and relations between Jews and Gentiles, creates quite a strange, indeed almost racist atmosphere – ‘racist’ in the sense of suggesting some kind of innate, determinative difference.  The subject matter means that, from the outset, Jews and Gentiles are divided, and treated as quite separate groups.  And whilst Lindemann starts out with the premise that today we don’t find any significant difference in ‘race’, in discussing a society where apparently everyone did, the objective (or modern) disregard for race is not always a key part of the discussion.

    This strangeness is intensified by Lindemann’s tendency to talk about ‘kinds’ of people, as though social tendencies are somehow integral and permanent.  For example, on p.233, he refers to ‘those members of society prone to violence and vandalism on the streets’, and on p.234, he says that ‘Captain Dreyfus’s story has been too tempting, too appealing to the popular, vulgarizing kind of historian’.

    So too, there was something a little odd, I thought, about Lindemann’s attempts to refute the idea that antisemitism was based on fantasy and had little to do with Jews themselves.  ‘It is particularly inaccurate and misleading,’ he says, ‘to insist that these anti-Jewish leaders were lashing out at targets they knew nothing about.  Nearly all of the prominent anti-Semites of these years had regular, even intimate contacts with Jews… Von Treitschke’s ire at Graetz’s writings was hardly the result of baseless fantasies, and Goldwyn Smith’s anger at Disraeli was based on the fact that Disraeli had mocked him.  Smith and others who attacked Disraeli in anti-semitic language also simply differed with Disraeli on political and foreign policy issues.’ (p.271) But there is a world of difference surely, between one man disliking another simply for personal or political reasons, and his extending that dislike to an enormous group of people who he feels must share the characteristics of the one.  Lindemann has explained the first position, but not the second; even after his analysis, it is still perfectly sensible to say that antisemitism has little to do with Jewish people as a group.

    I loved the territorial breadth of this book, and the temporal breadth.  By discussing the situation of Jewish people in Europe before the First World War, it felt like the book filled in the missing first half of the story.  I thought that it gained something by not centring directly on the Nazis – although obviously the Holocaust was still a dominant presence.  I also loved that academic thing where the writer begins by reviewing the field of study as a whole and evaluating its weaknesses.  It does seem strange that the book has no bibliography though.

Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985, by Adrienne Rich, Virago Press (1987).

Back in college (and not reading my course texts), I collected books on the women’s movement.  The second-hand bookshops of York were apparently hotbeds of second-wave feminism, so I had lots of books published in the 1970s.  I didn’t read many of them (this was my non-reading period) – it just seemed important to keep them.  I bought this book back then.  I had heard of Adrienne Rich elsewhere but I was not (am still not) familiar with her poetry.

    I do really like her prose writing though.  She has both sincerity and authority about her, and although the book was in parts particularly dense and theoretical, there were many moments of wonderful clarity.

    One thing that struck me quite forcibly was her discussion of racism within the feminist movement.  Rich grew up in the American South, and the issue seems to have been one of immediate importance to her.  It surprised me how much of the language and argument she uses has echoes in the Black Lives Matter movement today. She talks about intersectionality and ‘having work to do’ within herself, and the term ‘anti-racism’ crops up repeatedly. (p.82-84) For some reason, I had assumed these were modern phrases.  It made visible the links between academic work and popular movements, that I hadn’t appreciated before.

    I found Rich very pragmatic and helpful on a subject which, sometimes, there doesn’t seem to be any way of addressing at all. ‘I have come to wonder,’ she writes, ‘if guilt, with its connotations of being emotionally overwhelmed and bullied, or paralysed, is not more a form of defensive resentment or self-protection than an authentic response to the past and its warts… I would like to ask every white woman who feels that her guilt is being provoked in discussions of racism to consider what uses she has for this guilt and how it uses her, and to decide for herself if a guilt-ridden feminism… sounds like a viable way of life.’ (p.82) In other words, whilst we should all be trying to ‘unlearn the norm of universal whiteness’, as she puts it elsewhere, guilt is not a particularly productive response.

    In ‘Towards a More Feminist Criticism’, she has this to say.  ‘No one is suggesting that the women with all or many of the privileges of white skin, heterosexuality, class background is thereby disqualified from writing and criticizing.  However, I believe she has a responsibility not to read, think, write, and act as if all women had the same privileges, or to assume that privilege confers some special vision.  She has a responsibility to be as clear as possible about the compromises she makes, about her own fear and trembling as she sits down to write; to admit her limitations when she picks up work by women who write from a very different culture and sourcement [sic?], to admit to feelings of confusion and being out of her depth.’ (p.95) It makes perfect sense.  My reservation would be that several things I have read recently suggest that it has been characteristic of women particularly, to hedge their words, temper them with qualifications and apologies, anything to soften their impact and avoid causing offence.  I suppose the subject matter makes all the difference.

    Coincidentally, having just read two books about antisemitism and the Holocaust, it turns out that Rich was also Jewish, and the book includes several essays where she examines her Jewish identity.  It’s quite a sad story of her father, who was an assimilated Jew, and had nothing to tell her on the subject.  When she went, by herself, to watch newsreels of the Allied liberation of the German concentration camps, her parents were not pleased, and she was unable to discuss it with them.  When she herself married a man from an orthodox, eastern European Jewish family, her father saw it as a betrayal and refused to attend the wedding.  She talks about how the women in her family were urged, particularly, to be quietly spoken – anything too flamboyant or aggressive would be seen as Jewish.  

    I think this is one of the things I really liked about the book – this mix of the personal with the political and academic.  

Dorothy B. Hughes, W. G. Sebald, and Oliver Sacks

In A Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, Penguin Classics (2010).

I am not usually a fan of thriller novels but this was recommended on Radio 4's 'A Good Read' programme, and I was persuaded to try it.  Having done so, I am still not a fan of thriller novels, but I have to admit, there was something completely, eerily gripping about the personality of the protagonist.

The story is about a guy called Dix Steele - ex-military - who moves to Los Angeles and eventually looks up an old friend from the forces who lives there.  The friend has joined the police and is involved in investigating a series of stranglings carried out in the area.  I don't think it's a spoiler (it's quite clear from the outset) that it is Steele who killing all these women.

It's not a gory book.  The ickiness, the tension, is around (a) whether he will be discovered, and (b) whether, as things start going wrong in the relationship he has with a women who lives in his apartment complex, and as the police start to get closer to him, he will kill again, as a sort of release; to clear his mind and get him back on track.

Steele has a lot of plates spinning at once - a lot of lies going on - which set me on edge right from the start.  Obviously, he lies about the murders, but also about the circumstances in which he came to live in the apartment, about writing a book, about having money - and, at a more basic level, his personality is a rather brittle facade.  Each of these lies begins to give as the story progresses.

I couldn't quite get to grips, either, with the way Steele accommodates his desire to kill within his personality.  It wasn't quite Jekyll & Hyde - he was not unaware of the murders he had committed, and he was clearly cautious when talking to his policeman friend.  On the other hand, it wasn't like he lived the reality of what he was every day either.  There was a kind of separation between the self that killed and the self that lounged around, pretending to be a writer whilst wining and dining glamorous women.  I have read somewhere that it is not unusual for serial killers to return to the scene of their crimes.  This guy has no interest in that at all.   Killing isn't some entire fantasy world that he lives in - it's just an instinct which arises intermittently, and delivers him a shot in the arm.

This is not a book for someone with anxiety issues - not because of the killing but because, as a reader, you're effectively paired up with Steele, sharing the way he analyses the other characters, scrutinising them for signs of suspicion, coldness, dislike.  Irrationally, I felt quite hurt when he sensed people withdrawing from him.

Another discomforting thing about Steele is his optimism.  In Andrew Solomon's book, The Noonday Demon, he suggests that one of the [few] redeeming features of depression is its realism.  When questioned following a test, depressive people showed a greater awareness of where they were likely to have gone wrong and what the outcome was likely to be, compared to non-depressives who frequently over-estimated how well they'd done.  I would put myself in the depressive-but-realistic camp.  Steele is definitely not depressive.  He has the kind of outlook that salesmen always seem to have (no offence) - a kind of impervious confidence in himself, regardless of what goes wrong.  He gets upset, dramatically tears a cheque to shreds, then the next minute he goes out to buy a new jacket and suddenly he's feeling good about himself again.

The book reminded me of Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith (another thriller I was fooled into reading by Harriet Gilbert!) - perhaps because it seems to come from a similar era, but also for the rootless, untethered personality of the killer.

Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald, Penguin Books (2002).

I really enjoyed this.  It is a very, very gentle, academically meditative book - a little bit like Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson - except that this is described more as a journey than as an event.  There are no chapters, no breaks - no paragraphs even - just a long narrative, with nothing particular to mark either the beginning or the end.  The sentence structure is long and meandering too - but not in a confused way; the effect is thoughtful.  For example, on p.202-3, 'I got the address of authorities who might be consulted in a case like mine from the embassy of the Czech Republic, and then, immediately after arriving at Ruzyne airport on a day which was much too bright, almost over-exposed, a day, said Austerlitz, when people looked as ill and grey as if they were all chronic smokers not far from death, I took a taxi to the Karmelitska in the Lesser Quarter, where the state archives are housed in a very peculiar building going far back in time if not even, like so much in the city of Prague, standing outside time altogether.'  I think what prevents this from being totally incomprehensible is the fact that that part of the sentence following the parenthesis is explicable without going back to see how the sentence began; the parentheses are long but you can safely lose track of them without losing the meaning.

The narrator in the story is an almost unimportant figure (male or female?) who meets a man called Austerlitz, and this is Austerlitz's story told by him but through the narrator (a sort of Dr Watson-Sherlock Holmes relationship), without the benefit of speech marks, so there are some strange features to it.  For example, he frequently says 'they said' (or something similar) twice - e.g. 'None the less, said Vera, Austerlitz continued, Maximilian did not...' (p.236)

Another strange but powerful feature is the photographs.  The book is full of photographs - mostly of buildings and landscapes, but occasionally of family members.  If the story is fiction, then who are the people in the photographs?  The cover photograph, in particular, of the austere, autocratic little boy with the blonde curls and satin cavalier outfit, becomes more and more gripping as the story goes on.

It's another book about the destruction and scattering of Jewish people in Eastern Europe from the 1930s.  Austerlitz is Czech and, at the age of four, was put by his mother on a train out of the country, just before the Nazis entered.  When he arrived in Britain, he was adopted by a Welsh minister and his wife, and had a somber, unhappy - if not materially deprived - childhood.  Of his past, he remembers nothing at all, and it is only much later on (in his fifties or sixties?) as he travels around studying the architecture which is his area of academic expertise, that he begins to acknowledge how little he knows of his past, and how certain things - places, sights, styles of architecture - seem familiar and invoke emotional responses in him, but he has no idea why.  So begins his search into the past, for his parents and the life they had before his evacuation.  As I said, there's no conclusive end to the story - but then, presumably that is the case for many people in his position.

I love history, and particularly tantalising is history which is just about accessible through memory - the memories of parents and grandparents.  I love books that, through the mining of such memories, seek to lay claim to ordinary people from the past.

When I was looking at our family genealogy, it was really exciting to discover that one branch were, in the nineteenth century, ordinary poor people in the East End of London.  'The poor' in English history are this enormous anonymous crowd, often referred to, and often demonised by contemporaries.  They're like a group of lost children among whom, to find your own, feels like you're putting right the wrongs of the past; reclaiming something; giving voice to people where none was heard before.

The situation of Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s feels like a particularly acute version of this.  I have read a few books recently about people discovering what happened to their relatives during the Second World War, and amid the stories of the terrible things that happened, there feels something quite salvational about descendants connecting with ancestors.  Even as a work of fiction, this book felt quite powerful.  I don't know what the story of the photographs is, but it feels like Sebald found a photograph of a little Jewish boy from Czech - one of these ancestral orphans that no one has yet laid claim to - and wrote a back story for him.

On The Move: A Life, by Oliver Sacks, Picador (2015).

Another stonker!  A few months ago, I read Sacks's book, Uncle Tungsten, an account of his childhood which I found rather too scientific for my brain, but utterly compelling in its more personal moments.  In particular, he had a wonderfully large, eccentric, incredibly able and resilient family, which I would love to have read more about.

This book contains very little about Sacks's family, but it turns out that Sacks himself is a man I could happily read about all day.  Furthermore, his work was fascinating, even to a committed non-scientist like myself.  He had a wide range of interests within his professional career, but this book seemed to be dominated by his work at the Beth Abraham hospital in New York in the second half of the 1960s.

When he started working at the hospital, Sacks discovered that it held around 80 individuals who were among the last survivors of the 'sleepy sickness' pandemic of the 1920s.  The pandemic (topically), 'had killed  many thousands outright, and those who had seemingly recovered often came down, sometimes decades later, with strange postencephalitic syndromes.  Many were frozen in deep parkinsonian states, some stuck in catatonic postures - not unconscious but with their consciousness suspended at the point where the disease had closed in on certain parts of the brain.' (p.169) The Beth Abraham hospital had first opened as a facility for such patients, some of whom had been there, frozen, for thirty or forty years.

One of Sacks's innovations was to trial these patients with L-dopa, a drug which had - just the previous year - been shown to be very effective in the treatment of Parkinson's disease.  The outcome of this trial was dramatic and, for a few months, there were hopes that some of the patients would be able to leave the hospital, cured, as it were.  By the time the summer of 1967 was over however, it had become clear that L-dopa was not going to be an unqualified success story.  Not only were there side effects - very pronounced physical tics - but the results of treatment were also unpredictable: patients did not react the same way every time they took it.  Furthermore, in the documentary which followed Sack's book on the subject (it's on Youtube; do watch it), it is clear that, after the initial excitement, the psychological effects on people of having lost large chunks of their lives and 'come to' in a world enormously different from the one they had known, not to mention the loss of family members, many of whom had broken down or moved on in the intervening decades, were sometimes just too heavy, too much, and people retreated back into catatonic states.

Sacks's book (written with his patients support) seems to have been something new in the field of medical literature, and this was not appreciated by all his colleagues.  None the less, it is this kind of writing that he became known for, and popular for, and this entire episode - indeed, the patients themselves - continued to be important in Sacks's life.  There was a documentary, and a film with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams, and although he was sacked following a strange, minor dispute over accommodation, he continued to visit his patients, and later returned to work there again.  In some ways, it seems like those patients were his life's work.  What came over particularly clearly in watching the documentary was how Sacks was both fascinated by this condition and its manifestations, and deeply compassionate and caring towards his patients.

As noted above, whilst Sack's work definitely made the book a page-turner, he was himself a very appealing character: a keen traveller, motorcyclist and body-builder, and very good-looking.  Also, gay, a fact which - although he seems to have been at peace with it - clearly affected his life considerably.

He writes with such a laid-back, sunny personality that he presents his mother's harsh reaction to finding out that he was gay in much the same way as other, more light-hearted, humorous anecdotes.  When I was reading Richard Meinertzhagen's autobiography, I was unconvinced by the fondness he expressed for his mother, as an adult; his insistence that he had completely forgiven her for how vile she had been to him as a child.  With Sacks, who was also very attached to his mother, I looked at it differently.  Her expression of aversion to his sexuality seems to have been an isolated outburst, which didn't taint their subsequent relationship.  Writing that now, it sounds unlikely to me all over again, but Sacks makes little enough of it in the book, and it's clear that his mother, and her stories, and her outlook on life, were very influential to him and close to his heart.

I don't want to harp on about the gay thing, but I feel like I ought to make the book review equivalent of a question mark in the margin, at his description of his first sexual experience.  Feeling like he's left it quite late, a young twenty-something Sacks goes to Amsterdam to keep an appointment with a [female?] prostitute.  He is very nervous, over-imbibes on Dutch courage, and passes out.  The next morning, he wakes up in the bed of some strange man.  As Sacks puts it, 'he had seen me lying dead drunk in the gutter, he said, had taken me home... and buggered me.  "Was it nice?" I asked.'  (Ellipsis in the original.)

I had a sort of silent, modern 'wtf moment' here - particularly when the man goes on to admonish him for drinking to the extent that he passes out in the street: 'this is a very sad - even dangerous - thing to do.' (p.30) I don't think I've ever heard anyone indicate so overtly as Sacks does here that there are different rules for men who have sex with men, than for women who have sex with men.  Wasn't this a sexual assault?  Can the status of such an unambiguously non-consensual act sometimes be determined afterwards?  ('Do I feel assaulted?')  I can't imagine a woman reacting  to this situation in the way Sacks did.  To what extent was his reaction determined by the fact of his being a) a man, and b) gay?  And maybe c) himself physically fit and perhaps unaware of the threat of male violence?

Another thing that struck me reading this book was Sacks's resilience.  As noted earlier, he seemed to have a sunny, self-confident, 'easy come easy go' personality.  Yet he describes at least two occasions where he takes up research positions, something he apparently wasn't suited to, and becomes very unhappy, struggling with something like depression.  He also insists that he is very shy (p.236) - although many popular, socially successful people seem to make this assertion at some point - and it was only as I was nearing the end of the book that I began to realise how much time he actually did spend in quite a solitary way; certainly not alone, but unattached to anyone in particular for long periods.

It seemed like another perspective on depression, as discussed in The Noonday Demon.  Sacks does not seem to have had the same vulnerability to depression shown by the people interviewed in Solomon's book.  Despite some occasionally very bad times, and a rather solitary life, he remained balanced, thoughtful, amused, incurably pleasant about it all!  I suppose in someone else, it might be annoying, but I didn't find it so in Sacks.