Curious might be the best term to describe Raymond Tallis’ unique third-person biography of RT, who bears a strikingly resemblance to Raymond Tallis. Curious both in its interests and its execution. Its interests being the varieties of ways and means in which RT has interacted with the world around him. The ‘world’ includes other people but they, like stones, are largely opaque to RT and only the passionate encounter of Mrs RT reaches over that horizon of unknowability (or at least possibly). Curious also in its execution in that Tallis maintains this apparently disinterested interest in himself at length. It is a style that is oddly captivating at first, then a bit tiresome, then somewhat excruciating, and eventually oddly captivating again.

Why write such a book? We can ignore the bookseller labelling of this as philosophy. No practising philosopher would acknowledge it as such. It bears greater affinity to the elegy or perhaps a tone-poem. It is characterized, inordinately, by lists of things. Indeed, any sentence with less than 10 commas separating nouns or noun phrases is positively terse. I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to write such a work. After all it is surprisingly lengthy. It isn’t particularly driven by any narrative. And its organizing superstructure is less than convincing, as though perhaps a publisher insisted on chapter headings to make it more palatable to the general reader. But what would it be like to sit down day after day and write in this manner? Even someone with Tallis’ prolixity might find it boring, wouldn’t he? Not that Tallis is unaware of the challenges his writing poses. There is a useful coda in which he brings himself to task for his failures. Though given that it is written in precisely the same manner, it rather seems as though he may not be fully serious about his self chastisement.

And so I’m left without much of anything to say about this. I suppose, as Tallis hopes, there might be someone who will find this inspirational. I’m just not sure that I’d want to meet that person at a dinner party. For my own part, I found it tedious despite fleeting moments of near wit.

And so, not recommended. ( )