Misadventures Book

Sylvia Smith's first book is something of an enigma. Smith, born at the close of the Second World War in East London to working-class parents, is an unmarried, career secretary who has chosen to write her memoirs. Curiously nothing of note has happened to Smith to encourage the belief that her reminiscences might be of interest to the general reader but, fantastically, this only makes the book both more of a curiosity and more of a compelling read. In a series of short, deadpan, dated chapters Sylvia records a series of vignettes that each encapsulate the mostly lows and sometimes highs of the quotidian. Her life has not been without incident--it is just that not many of us would consider incidents such as being stood up on a second date, witnessing a non-fatal, non-serious car crash or the low-level embarrassment of being drunk worth recording. Smith's genius, or that of her publishers (it is difficult to know at what level of irony we are dealing here, on whom the joke actually is) is to understand that these moments are indeed worth recording because they are moments we all share. Most lives are ordinary lives, ordinary lives are the lives most of us live. And Smith's biography, which is hilarious in its mundanity, glorious in its saturating bathos, validates the day to day. All great stories are the embellishment of the ordinary, but here something special has been created precisely because of its seeming lack of affectation, its flat directness feeling like a wonderful antidote to the overwritten, stylised recording endemic to biography. A triumph and a real treat. --Mark ThwaiteRead More