The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (60 page)

A
man’s fate is his character,” said Heraclitus, many years ago. Society in the West took a grand detour from this idea, believing in medieval times that God, or fate, held the reigns and the individual was a mere pawn. If an individual couldn’t shape his or her own destiny, what did personality matter? But then, suddenly, God (or
fate) took a backseat. A successful life depended on an individual’s ability to make it so—and, hey,
presto
, the novel was born.
*

Robinson Crusoe
was the first demonstration in literature of the power of optimism to turn a life around. At first, Crusoe’s situation looks unremittingly bleak. The sole survivor of a shipwreck, he finds himself on a barren, uninhabited island with nothing but a knife, a pipe, and a little tobacco in a box. In “terrible agonies” of mind, he runs around like a madman, convinced he’s about to be eaten by a ravenous beast.

As we all know, it’s hard to achieve anything when you’re in such a state (see: Broken heart; Depression, general). What saves Crusoe is forcing himself to think positively. He plunders what remains on board the ship before it sinks, finds a pen and paper among the booty, and sets down “the good against the evil” of his situation—in other words, he writes a good old list of pros and cons. By doing this, he discovers something simple but life changing: that the pros cancel out the cons, and because he can’t imagine anything worse than his predicament, he concludes that there’s “scarce any condition in the world so miserable but there was something . . . positive to be thankful for in it.” Hurrah to that!

And so, buoyed by looking on the bright side, Crusoe does all the things necessary to survive: he hunts, rears goats, plants crops, adopts a parrot, makes pots, and does his own handiwork (and is good at it, but if he wasn’t, we’d direct him to: DIY). He goes on to become a self-sufficiency expert on the island for twenty-eight years.

A successful life is about finding your inner resources—never more so than when times are hard. If you refuse, in your darkest moments, to give in to pessimism and despair, but instead dig up some optimism and a cheery outlook, you’ll not only have discovered the best in yourself, but you’ll also become your own best friend. We’ll go as far as saying that, with optimism at hand, it almost doesn’t matter what happens. Bring on the shipwrecks. Keep Crusoe by your side. As Heraclitus might have put it if he’d thought of it first: choose optimism over pessimism and you’ll have a much nicer life.
*

See also:
Cynicism
•
Despair
•
Faith, loss of
•
Hope, loss of
•
Pointlessness
•
Trust, loss of

See:
Agoraphobia
•
Claustrophobia
•
Homophobia
•
Xenophobia

Y
our legs ache. You’ve got the chills. You don’t want to move very fast. Anything too challenging may reduce you to tears. Cozy up under the duvet with a heating pad and a good girly read: an all-enveloping analgesic.

See also:
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Cry, in need of a good
•
Headache
•
Irritability
•
Pain, being in
•
Tired and emotional, being

The House of the Spirits
ISABEL ALLENDE

The Red Tent
ANITA DIAMANT

The Round House
LOUISE ERDRICH

The Virgin Suicides
JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The Edge of Reason
HELEN FIELDING

A Map of the World
JANE HAMILTON

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
MARISHA PESSL

The Unbearable Lightness

of Scones
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

Brother of the More Famous Jack
BARBARA TRAPIDO

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
REBECCA WELLS

Life: A User’s Manual

GEORGES PEREC

W
e know what you’re thinking. What’s the point of prescribing a cure for pointlessness? In fact, what is the point of prescribing anything for anything? It’s all meaningless, devoid of
purpose, right? Not once you’ve read Georges Perec’s novel
*
Life: A User’s Manual.

The novel opens with an apartment block in Paris, frozen in time just before eight p.m. on June 23, 1975, seconds after the death of one of its inhabitants, Bartlebooth. Another resident, Serge Valène, has set himself the task of painting the entire apartment block “in elevation”—with the facade removed—revealing all the inhabitants, and their possessions, in perfect detail.
*

It transpires that the recently deceased Bartlebooth, a wealthy Englishman, had devised a (pointless) plan to dispose of his immense fortune, and thus occupy the rest of his life. The plan was for the painter Serge Valène to teach him to paint and for Bartlebooth to then embark, with his servant Smautf (another inhabitant of the block), on a decadelong trip around the world, painting a watercolor every two weeks, with the ultimate aim of creating five hundred paintings. Each painting would be sent back to France, where the paper would be glued to a support and cut into a jigsaw puzzle by another resident of the apartment block, Gaspard Winckler. On his return, Bartlebooth would solve the puzzles, re-creating the scene that he himself had painted. Each completed puzzle would then be sealed back together and removed from its backing to leave the scene intact. Precisely twenty years to the day after each painting was made, it would be sent back to the same place where it had been painted, at one of hundreds of places around the globe, then placed by an assistant stationed there in a special solution that would extract all color from the paper, then returned by post, blank, to Bartlebooth.

A pointless task, some would say. And to make it even more so, Bartlebooth goes blind during the process, so that it’s increasingly difficult to finish the puzzles. And in the end, when he lies dead at his puzzle with one space in the shape of a
W
still to fill, and in his hand a piece in the shape of an
X
, we cannot help wondering what has been the point of it all.

And yet, the journey to this point in the novel has been remarkably rich. Perec has provided us with a wealth of stories, ideas, and opportunities for laughter—and herein lies the clue to the point of pointlessness. Pointlessness
itself can be a source of great joy, if we cease to worry about its pointlessness, reveling in the life, the quirks, the marvelous minutiae, the sheer excuse for stories, that this very pointlessness offers. And this is precisely the point—or one of its many points.
*
But its ultimate point is that the point of existence is simply that, despite its pointlessness—despite the fact that the last piece of your last puzzle does not fit—the journey toward that wrongly shaped hole is full of fascination and delight.

See also
:
Cynicism
•
Despair
•
Happiness, searching for
•
Pessimism

A Dance to the Music of Time

ANTHONY POWELL

G
irls, it’s one mother of a journey. One minute you’re a happy-go-lucky solo player with ordinary things to worry about—what color to dye your hair, whether to go to Mongolia or Milan for your next trip, and whether to wax or shave—then the next thing you know you are ballooning out a pair of stretchy jeans, having to sleep with a pillow between your knees, and reading books which tell you to shove cabbage leaves into your bra cups.

While your ligaments soften and stretch, and while blood is being diverted to various complex tasks of internal creation, we suggest you make the most of your brain before full-on “mummification” sets in. Ignore the siren calls of your house to be redecorated. Milk your state by seizing this moment to read. Because pregnancy is a real chance to take on something long and engrossing, something that, in years to come, will define this expectant period of your life. And what better, as you contemplate your own current steps in the dance of time, than the twelve-novel cycle of Anthony Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time
.

Inspired by Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the same name, Powell’s saga follows its narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, from his school days during the First World War right up to the 1970s, so that as well as running the gamut of a life, it is a portrait of a century. Marriage, infidelity, voyeurism, and even
necrophilia are in the mix, but creativity is the unifying theme—as Moreland composes, Barnby paints, and Trapnel and the narrator write. Stack the twelve novels by your bed and devour them one by one as you nourish the burgeoning life inside you. You will delight in being lost to this bohemian world in the company of stylish people, and you’ll be ready to begin a new dance yourself.

See also:
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Childbirth
•
Hemorrhoids
•
Motherhood
•
Nausea
•
Tired and emotional, being

See:
Arrogance
•
Brainy, being exceptionally
•
Confidence, too much
•
Extravagance
•
Vanity
•
Well-read, desire to seem

The Remains of the Day

KAZUO ISHIGURO