MY BOOK OF THE YEAR
The Voyeur’s Motel Gay Talese (Grove Press €20.99)
Three of the year’s sparkiest and most enjoyable books were the work of men in their late 70s and early 80s. The Voyeur’s Motel, by Gay Talese, 84, was not everybody’s cup of tea, being the reallife story of a seedy American motel owner, Gerald Foos, who spied on his guests through peepholes in their ceilings, but it had me hooked. ‘My absolute solution to happiness,’ Foos told Talese, ‘was to be able to invade the privacy of others without their knowing it.’ He didn’t want to be described as a peeping Tom, preferring to think of himself as ‘a pioneering sex researcher’. He even kept copious notes to prove it. Like many perverts, he is also a prig. He pursued his obsession over some decades, aided first by one wife, then another. For most of the time, he kept the veteran journalist Talese informed of his guests’ various comings and goings. At one point, he witnessed a murder through his peephole, though some critics have queried whether this actually happened. It’s an unsettling book, like being trapped in a hall of mirrors. The reader observes Talese observing Foos observing his guests. It might make you lose your bearings, but at the same time it’s completely mesmerising, and often darkly funny, too.
AND THE RUNNERS-UP...
With Keeping On Keeping On (Profile €30.99), Alan Bennett, 82, has produced another whopping volume of diaries, with a few plays and speeches thrown in for good measure.
Bennett puts a lot of energy into trying to prove he’s no cuddly national treasure, ranting against Tony Blair, David Cameron and Boris Johnson with a new note of venom, but he can’t stop undermining his cause with good jokes. ‘I am in the pigeon-hole marked “no threat”,’ he writes, ‘and did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear.’
I love him for his funny stories and his beady observations (starlings, he says, are ‘slightly sweaty birds’). He can also make you think again about things you have always taken for granted, as when he points out that the paintings of Leonardo are ‘a bit creepy’. And, despite himself, he is as on the ball as any ambitious young stand-up: of Lady Gaga’s costume, made entirely of meat, he writes, ‘It’s not a dress in which you would want to walk the dog.’ At one point in Alan Bennett’s diary, three different people at the same party mistake him for David Hockney. Apart from certain vocal and facial similarities, the two of them are proof that artists can produce great work well into old age. This is, in fact, one of many themes touched on by Hockney, 79, in the beautifully illustrated A History Of Pictures (Thames & Hudson €41.95), written with art critic Martin Gayford. How are pictures made? What parts do light, colour, shadow and memory play? Through the eyes of Hockney and Gayford, we see familiar paintings as though for the very first time.