The Twinkling of an Eye or My Life as an Englishman Book

Autobiography is about the sorting out of those moments which gave one identity. For Brian Aldiss, distinguished science-fiction writer and all-round literary gent, these are a disparate Lot--the lost paradise of his grandfather's Norfolk haberdashery store, the excitement and terror of the Army's triumphant thrust through Burma, the intermittent bliss of his second marriage, the mid-life crisis of depressive illness through which he came to new joy. Books are important too--the books that educated him, his early manhood as a bookseller, the books the writing of which was a principal delight and a source of personal freedom. This is partly the story of the making of a writer and of a writer's life; it is also about a life lived in lose contact with both ideas and the senses. Sequential time is no major part of his approach. Some sections of the book are brief summaries, and others rehashes, of things he has said before, but which are crucial to him. Aldiss tells us how things felt to a middle-class Englishman in the 20th century--love, bereavement, travel, war, psychoanalysis, and the discovery of Pluto; if not a great book, it will remain a perennially attractive one. --Roz KaveneyRead More