KEY POINTS:
The lure of the autobiography or the memoir might be, as Eve Claxton writes in her introduction, that: "There is something eternally seductive about a book that invites you to eavesdrop on an intimate universe."
That universe can be as intimate, or entire, as the writer allows. But a memoir will contain a particular universe - if you like it there, you will want to read to the limits of its boundaries. The Book of Life sounds like a good idea.
It begins with an excerpt from St Augustine's writings on being very young, and ends with a piece taken from the work of archaeologist Margaret Murray, who didn't succumb to the desire to give some shape to her life through words until she was 100.
It is really a series of short ideas. Which is not to say that many of these pieces of autobiography are not immensely readable, and many are entertaining. They just don't, and can't, add up to anything more than a book of bits of lives.
And the context gets tricky. Obviously, this being a compendium, we are reading out of context, but the tricky bit is getting the tone of the categ-ories right.
The book is divided into three parts: beginnings, infancy through childhood, the middle, and towards the end - the place where memoir writing often begins. But who follows who? This is not a question of tone, strictly speaking, although here it inevitably becomes just that.
So who goes before Primo Levi, say? Noel Coward and J.M. Coetzee do.
A less serious question: Who will go before Mark Twain?
Anthony Trollope does. He is fortunate to not come after Twain, whose penultimate sentence is this: "When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but things that never happen."
Which has it all really: from youth to old age; the vagaries of memory and hence the memoir, all in one sentence.
The Book of Life does not have it all, no compendium could. Many of my favourite memoirists are not here. Some are, but I've already read the entire memoir. If I've forgotten - due to my decaying faculties - reading particular memoirs, this could, I suppose, send me back to those books.
That might be this book's purpose, but it felt a bit like the frustrating practice of eavesdropping: you might hear a tantalising snippet, but out of context, and you might be left wondering why you bothered.
* Michele Hewitson is a Herald features writer.
