Product Description
When he twisted sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray started to protect a diary: not a careful honing of the day’s actions with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, emotionally, digressively expressed. The three volumes of “The Smoking Diaries” are the result, in which lone of Britain’s most amusing and original writers reflects on a life to the top with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and loads of more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and like. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining.This gorgeous boxed set contains paperbacks of “The Smoking Diaries”, “The Smoking Diaries: The Year of the Jouncer”, and “The Smoking Diaries: The Last Cigarette”, only just in print in hardback in April 2008.With their amalgamation of comedy and serious reflection, of astute observation and painful self-disclosure, Simon Gray’s diaries have reinvented the memoir form and are destined to be converted into classics of autobiography. The beauty of them lies in Gray’s struggle to place a finger on some kind of private truth. “The Smoking Diaries” produce a brilliant and moving account of life’s unsteady progress – with unfailing wit and humour, they take us to the very sensitivity of a man.
The Smoking Diaries: Boxed Set
3 Comments
This book was a enormous bestseller in England and spawned a couple of sequels. The author, Simon Gray, is a well-known British playwright (of course, he’s unheard of in the United States). Gray is very witty and his diaries constitute the perfect companion for anyone growing ancient but not only unwilling to go gently into that excellent nighttime but instead thoroughly willing to produce the excellent nighttime a boffing about the bollocks. Oh, here’s a lot of smoking in this book–as the title suggests–so if you find that objectionable, well, please believe emancipated to go willingly away.
Rating: 4 / 5
Simon Gray is at the aim. His friends are ill or dying, he is ill and dying – HAS now died. All is crumbling and fragmenting in a tumult of despair and decay. But here is fantastic daring and humour aplenty in these memoirs as Simon Gray documents a year in his life replete with digressions that shed set alight on the rich treasure trove of his mind.
Here are superb riffs on the friends and strangers he encounters, holidays he takes, books he is reading – books he wishes he was reading instead, memories of his childhood sexual awakenings by road of American crime novelist Whirl Janson, reflections on various points of his life since and grim projections into his vastly curtailed future.
The tales are fantastic. Such as the tale of a chain smoking alcoholic friend whose partner, on his deathbed, forced a glass of whisky and a lit cigarette into each hand ‘if photographed, it may possibly serve as the ghastliest of warnings – peek what I have done’. And a vignette from a train journey in Suffolk when he encounters what he takes to be a psychopathic murderer but is just an aimiable gentleman trying to reclaim his newspaper which the author has taken.
Ditch those tedious memoirs from whiny American affluenza riddled losers who write about how they messed up their lives through drugs and got them back collectively again, and pick of the litter up Gray’s memoirs (loads of more in the series than this) which show how rich the form can be when place in the hands of a wily ancient English novelist with plenty of wit and interests in life.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book was exceptional, dealing with issues related to the aim of life. It arrived in excellent physical shape up.
Rating: 5 / 5