The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (57 page)

Next time you’re woken by next door’s teenager playing the drums, think about how soulless it would be if they weren’t there. Bring the fence down—metaphorically, if not literally—and feel the warm breeze blow through.

See also:
City fatigue
•
Misanthropy
•
Noise, too much

See:
Loneliness

I
f you’re prone to being disturbed by bad dreams in the lonesome early hours, a soothing novel will help to reset your psyche. Keep a stash of these river reads by your bed and drift back to sleep in their current.

The River Why
DAVID JAMES DUNCAN

Deep River
SHUSAKU ENDO

The Wind in the Willows
KENNETH GRAHAME

The River King
ALICE HOFFMAN

Three Men in a Boat
JEROME K. JEROME

A River Runs Through It
NORMAN MACLEAN

A River Sutra
GITA MEHTA

The Guide
R. K. NARAYAN

Waterland
GRAHAM SWIFT

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
MARK TWAIN

The Secret Scripture
SEBASTIAN BARRY

Through the Looking-Glass
LEWIS CARROLL

Bleak House
CHARLES DICKENS

Benediction
KENT HARUF

The Old Man and the Sea
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
MILAN KUNDERA

The Stone Angel
MARGARET LAURENCE

Nightmare Abbey
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

The Grapes of Wrath
JOHN STEINBECK

The Mating Season
P. G. WODEHOUSE

See:
Unpopular, being

W
hen your surroundings are too noisy—maybe the TV is always on, or your fellow commuters are shouting into their phones, or the guy on the treadmill is grunting—seal yourself off in a world of your own with an audiobook and a good pair of headphones. You’ll find that to be read to is a treat—and, with these readers, an unforgettable experience.

Middlemarch
GEORGE ELIOT, READ BY JULIET STEVENSON

The Great Gatsby
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, READ BY FRANK MULLER

The Corrections
JONATHAN FRANZEN, READ BY DYLAN BAKER

The Return of the Native
THOMAS HARDY, READ BY ALAN RICKMAN

The Old Man and the
Sea
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, READ BY

DONALD SUTHERLAND

Ulysses
JAMES JOYCE, READ BY JIM NORTON

Motherless Brooklyn
JONATHAN LETHEM, READ BY STEVE BUSCEMI

Wolf Hall
HILARY MANTEL, READ BY SIMON SLATER

His Dark Materials trilogy
PHILIP PULLMAN, READ BY

PHILIP PULLMAN AND OTHERS

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
J. K. ROWLING, READ BY

STEPHEN FRY

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

PATRICK SÜSKIND

S
o you hate your nose.

All noses are pretty weird, if you gaze at them long enough. Some are big, some are dainty, some are ski jumps, some are craggy outcrops complete with craters—but none, we can probably agree, are particularly lovely. What dictates how others perceive our nose is our own opinion of it, and those with high self-esteem carry their noses off whatever shape and size they are. To learn to love your nose, start not with the organ, but with yourself. See: Self-esteem, low.

On the other hand, if you really do have an ugly honker—and, wow, have we seen some misshapen disasters
*
—bury it immediately in
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
by Patrick Süskind. Within a page, you’ll be plunged into a time (the eighteenth century) when there reigned in the streets a stench “barely conceivable” to us today—a noxious mix of manure, urine, and “spoiled cabbage,” of “greasy sheets” and chamber pots, of blood, foul breath, and “tumorous disease.” Here, in the most putrid corner of the stinkiest of cities (Paris), is born Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, on the hottest day of
the year, his mother squatting among the fish guts under a table on which she’d just been scaling a (stinking) fish. He’s passed into the hands of a wet nurse, and thence to a cloister of monks—because, the wet nurse complains, the baby has no smell. There follows a description of how baby
should
smell—their feet are like “warm stone,” or “curds,” or “fresh butter,” the wet nurse says, feeling her way; their bodies “like a pancake that’s been soaked in milk,” and the back of their heads, the little bald spot left by the cowlick, that bit smells “best of all . . . like caramel.”

And so, within a few pages, we are vicariously exposed—because good writing succeeds in reproducing the whiffs themselves, or at least the reception of them in our brains—to smells at both ends of the olfactory repertoire. Jean-Baptiste himself, of course, though devoid of personal odor, has the most acute sense of smell in Paris and an indiscriminate, dangerous appetite for procuring new scents, especially those of young virgins. But, on the positive side, he earns a good living from his nose as a perfumer. And if, like him, you make full use of your nose, educating it with full-bodied red wines and freshly ground coffee beans, with subtle
parfums
and jasmine and a few drops of lemongrass essence on the sponge in your morning shower—if you fully appreciate its sensual input in your life—then, we guarantee, you’ll learn to love and appreciate your nose.

Even if it really is grotesque.

See also:
Vanity

A Far Cry from Kensington

MURIEL SPARK

•   •   •

Pereira Maintains

ANTONIO TABUCCHI

•   •   •

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

F
or a beautifully simple cure for obesity, follow the advice of Mrs. Hawkins, the double-chinned heroine of Muriel Spark’s mischievous satire of the publishing industry in postwar London. Mrs. Hawkins is liberal with her advice and doles it out on such far-ranging topics as finding a job, writing a book, improving your concentration, getting married, how to say no, where to go if you’ve had a lot of trouble,
*
and how to deal with too much casual correspondence. But her tip for losing weight is the best: eat half of what you would normally eat. “I offer this advice without fee,” she says. “It is included in the price of this book.” We bought her novel, and are now including the advice free in the price of ours.
*

Obesity often has a psychological cause, however, and no amount of dieting will help if the psychological cause remains untreated. So it is with Antonio Tabucchi’s Dr. Pereira, the portly, widowed editor of the culture page
of the
Lisboa
, Lisbon’s evening rag. It’s 1938, and under the shadow of war-torn, Fascist Spain, Lisbon “reeks of death.” Nobody has the courage to print the real news, and Pereira fills his page with translations of nineteenth-century French literature instead. Each day he cheers himself up by talking to a photo of his dead wife and tucking into an
omelette
aux fines herbes
and several glasses of lemonade at the Café Orquídea, washed down with coffee and a cigar.

That the omelets are having a deleterious effect on his waistline is clear to Pereira, but he finds himself unable to resist. It’s only when he meets Dr. Cardoso at an out-of-town spa that he begins to understand his need for fatty foods and sugary drinks. General Franco is making a mockery of his job, and therefore of him. Salvation arrives in the form of a young couple he meets at the Café Orquídea, who, Pereira eventually realizes, are involved in underground activities. Here is a way to fight Franco, and recover the “chieftanship” of his soul. It’s not long before Dr. Pereira is ordering seafood salads and mineral water instead.

If you’re overweight because you’re unhappy, don’t padlock the fridge or put yourself on a rigid diet; the diet will fail and you’ll only make yourself unhappier still. Try to discover why you are seeking consolation—this book may give you some ideas (for starters, try: Stuck in a rut, or Career, being in the wrong). Once you’ve ironed out your relationship with yourself, your relationship with food will self-correct.

And if you’re large and you like it, embrace the big-is-beautiful world of “traditionally built” (size twenty-two, to be precise) Mma Precious Ramotswe, star of Alexander McCall Smith’s famous detective series set in Botswana. Precious Ramotswe will show you how to be bold and break the rules, to carry your weight with dignity and aplomb, and win the heart of a good man (if you want one) just by being your witty and wise abundant self. They’re best read in order, beginning with
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

See also:
Gluttony
•
High blood pressure
•
Lethargy
•
Self-esteem, low
•
Snoring
•
Sweating

Death in Venice

THOMAS MANN

•   •   •

Moby-Dick

HERMAN MELVILLE

T
he truth is that the obsessed do not want to be cured. What they fear most is an end to their obsession, and to this heightened experience of life. For Aschenbach in
Death in Venice
, the three or four hours he spends each day sitting on the beach watching Tadzio at play—and then stalking the boy and his sisters through the increasingly fetid streets of cholera-ridden Venice—are “far too dear to him” to give up. He goes to bed at nine o’clock because, once Tadzio has left the scene, there’s nothing to stay awake for; indeed he can no longer imagine life without this gray-eyed boy with his captivating smile. He knows that the responsible thing to do would be to warn Tadzio’s mother about the “sickness” invading Venice, then lay his hand for the first and last time on Tadzio’s head and say good-bye. For by not warning her, he is risking Tadzio’s death from the cholera epidemic, as well as his own. But he knows that such an act would break the spell, “restore him” to himself, the reasonable Aschenbach of old. And he will not do it.

Part of what keeps the obsession alive is that Tadzio is Polish and Aschenbach can’t understand anything he says. So that what might be the “sheerest commonplace” is elevated, in Aschenbach’s ear, to the realms of music. When Tadzio emerges from the sea, his wet curls lit by the sun, nothing that he shouts out to his siblings on the beach can ruin it. In Aschenbach’s eyes he’s the real thing: a “tender young god.”

Moby-Dick assumes mythological proportions too. The crew have heard the rumors and seen how the whale possesses their own tormented Captain Ahab for a long time before they encounter the great Leviathan himself. When they finally glimpse him, they see only parts—a hump or a tail, a hot jet of vapor blasted into the sky—while the “full terrors” of his vast, shadowy bulk remain submerged. Moby-Dick’s inscrutability gives him power over the crew of the
Pequod
, and Ahab’s inscrutability gives him power over them too. Ishmael doesn’t even set eyes on the captain until several days into the voyage, and even then it’s a “moody stricken Ahab” he sees, so caught up in his own interior claims as to be unapproachable. But how else other than with sheer charisma could Ahab persuade his crew to pursue Moby-Dick, even when the boat was full to capacity with blubber—enough to make
them all rich—and when to carry on meant almost certain death? For they are compelled by one that is himself compelled; such is the power of obsession.

To the reader of
Death in Venice
,
Tadzio is just a boy. But Moby-Dick is never just a whale, and Captain Ahab is never just a man. When Ahab and Moby-Dick disappear together beneath the “great shroud” of the sea, their mutual charisma doesn’t die—something vast, tantalizing, terrible still remains, just out of reach. And so the power to obsess is transferred from the whale to the novel. Because perhaps more than any other novel in literary history,
Moby-Dick
has the ability to hook readers in a way that keeps them coming back throughout their lives. If Aschenbach had been able to know Tadzio, if Ahab had been able to know his whale, if the crew of the
Pequod
had been able to know Ahab, if the reader of
Moby-Dick
were able to
know
Moby-Dick, if Herman Melville . . .

Oh, what’s the use? You don’t want to know how to overcome an obsession. Being obsessed, you don’t want to be cured.

See also
:
Control freak, being a
•
Infatuation
•
Loneliness, reading induced
•
Love, unrequited
•
Read instead of live, tendency to
•
Reverence of books, excessive
•
Sci-fi, stuck on

Old Filth

JANE GARDAM

•   •   •

The Skeleton in the Cupboard

ALICE THOMAS ELLIS

O
ld age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.” So said wise old Somerset Maugham, who enjoyed his latter years so much he clung on into his nineties. But most of us can’t quite see the appeal, even as we’re forced to let old age creep slowly up. In order to inspire you to embrace the swan song years that lie ahead in a more positive way, we prescribe two novels to show you that just because you’re on in years doesn’t mean you’re past it.

Judge Feathers in Jane Gardam’s
Old Filth
is a supremely dignified and still strikingly handsome man with a powerful presence. And despite being given the nickname of the title, he’s also very clean—ostentatiously so. His shoes shine “like conkers” and his clothes have a 1920s elegance, complete
with a silk handkerchief in his pocket and yellow socks from Harrods. There is no smell of old age in his house—he is rich and long used to having “staff” do things for him. It is not for any lack of personal or domestic hygiene, then, that Judge Feathers is known as Filth, but because, in a phrase he self-deprecatingly coined himself, he “Failed in London, Tried Hong Kong.”