Time and Time Again, by Dan Jacobson (used)

Dan Jacobson was brought up in the South African town of Kimberley, after the end of the diamond boom which created it, at a time when 'a man could take a deck-chair into the middle of its main street and sit there for a morning without being disturbed'. His father came from Latvia, his mother from Lithuania. How and why did a boy with this background, from that sleepy, dust-scoured place, know so surely that he must go to England, there to become a writer and make his home?

He gives us the answer in these 'autobiographies’–stories from his own life, each one as close to the truth as he can make it, which link together into a whole.

Part One evokes Kimberley and its people, what it was like to go to school there, the different kinds of stress put on South Africans who were Jews, and the boy's discovery of his own calling. Part Two is set in England, starting in the bleak loneliness of bedsitterland and ending with quite recent intimations of mortality. It takes in an amazing little school where he once taught; a moving meeting, at the other end of the educational spectrum, with F.R. Leavis; glimpses of marriage and the establishment of a family; and two superb portraits, one of an uncle and one of his father in old age.Dan Jacobson finds watching other people more fascinating than watching himself: rather than display his own career, he chooses to invite readers into his head and lets them see what happened through his eyes. We learn about his life not by 'being told', but by sharing its intenser passages.

The immediate result of this method is that we enjoy a variety of events and people, and the end result is that we are left with a vivid sense of Dan Jacobson himself. We find that we have been led, almost unawares, to participate in one of the most impressive autobiographical exercises of recent years.

Condition: good