Jenny Diski: A View From The Bed

Reviewed by YVONNE VAN DONGEN

The arrival of A View from the Bed coincided with my own convalescence from the kind of exhaustion and illness you can only get from being on the road.

So I was in the mood for the musings of a woman who says she can do all she needs to entertain herself and earn her living without getting up, and that her idea of travel is to stay at home with the phone off the hook.

I knew just how she felt.

After scanning snappy chapter headings such as "Did Jesus walk on water because he couldn't swim?" or "A Slut's Slut", I imagined I'd be in for a sassy, funny, light read a la Julie Churchill. Wrong. An essay or two into the book and I quickly realised this was not bedtime reading for the weak-minded and infirm. Diski's bed book would have to wait till I was out of bed.

That's because the first half of the book contains her most thoughtful, almost scholarly book reviews, first published in the London Review of Books. But they're not so much book reviews as a stimulus for an argument arising from the book in question on subjects as diverse as Jewish sea-faring in ancient times, to a hairdresser's history of Paris.

They're wry and often faintly amused and, according to Diski, revealing opinions as arbitrary as the clothes she wears. But they're not funny in a laugh-out-loud way, or in the least bit light or frothy enough when you're under the weather.

I should have gone straight for the middle of the book, however, which is where most of more intimate columns begin. This is where you discover that Diski has a gift for comedy which is most evident when she writes about herself. I particularly liked the pieces on the effect of finding love later in life and her decision to shift from London to the house across the road from her lover in Cambridge.

And her writing on supermarket shopping completely transforms this mundane act into one of almost cultural and philosophical significance. Diski often says she doesn't get out much. She doesn't need to. Her interior landscape would keep anyone busy.

Once I'd recovered, I returned to the book reviews and what do you know? They were funny and instructive and wise. Like all the best literature really.

Virago, $54.40

* Yvonne van Dongen is the travel editor of On Holiday magazine.