The Colour of a Man Fading Away

I have been spouting off about things I don't like quite a lot recently so it is high time I raved about something wonderful.

So here I go.

The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn is the best book I have read so far this year. I think it is a masterpiece of memoir writing. It also scared the shit out of me.

On the surface it really isn't the sort of book I would normally read. It may well not sound like the sort of book you would normally read. If I had to sum it up in a sentence I would go for this one:

A writer suffering from liver failure looks back on episodes from his life as a drunk and down and out bumming around Europe.

But here's the thing, it is a truly remarkable story and written seemingly without an ounce of self-pity. It is as if the author is saying 'here are the facts about my life, you may find them interesting, but I am not asking for sympathy'.

And the facts are interesting. In 2006 Gwyn was given a year to live unless a suitable liver donor was found. He really isn't very well.

Cirrhosis of the liver, duodenal ulcers, perforated oesophagus, thrombocytopenia, umbilical and inguinal hernias, ruptured varices: the prognosis is poor, and the failure of my liver to process proteins causes ammonia to seep to the brain, making me temporarily insane.

The prognosis is poor? No shit, Sherlock.

I started reading this late one night, fully intending to flick through just a few pages to get a flavour of things, and found myself riveted by chapter two. It was utterly terrifying.

The chapter in questions describes the symptoms of hepatic encephalopathy, which reach a height for Gwyn in the spring of 2007. He tries to set fire to a power cable thinking he is, for some inexplicable reason, lighting a lighter. On another occasion he is discovered by his teenage daughter attempting to stuff an alarm clock with bread. The episodes get more and more violent until he peaks, and ends up in a semi-coma.

The progression of his disease forms the spine of the book; we keep coming back to his treatment and more examples of his disorientation and decline. These sections are some of the finest descriptions of illness I have ever read. They are, if you ask me, on a par with Hilary Mantel's recent Ink in the Blood or Joan Didion's writing about grief in The Year of Magical Thinking .

But, as you might expect when faced with possible death, Gwyn starts to look back upon his life and he has, as they say, been about a bit. We hear about the summer he spent as a teenager in the south of France, being taught about sex by an older woman in between games of chess with her disapproving father. Then there is the time he chopped off two of his fingers in a factory accident. Or the afternoon he spent chatting with Roberto Bolaño in France, although he did not realise it was him until he read of his death twenty years later. Throw in a drug-addled first marriage, a week in a Sicilian jail, spells working as a building labourer, fruit picker, caretaker and advertising salesman and you have a small selection of the episodes in this book.

But I am really not doing The Vagabond's Breakfast justice. It is fabulous and I would love as many of you as possible to read it and I am aware that I may not have done enough to convince you. So, with kind permission of the author and his publisher, I am going to run a series of extracts from the book across the whole of next week. I have picked out some of my favourite sections and I hope they will send you in the direction of this remarkable work.

Comments

[Rob]

I've been wondering if this guy would ever pop up again (I didn't know he was ill). I remember reading The Colour of a Dog Running Away about 5 years ago, and while I didn't think that much to it, it has niggled away at me over the years...

Writing about illness is having a bit of a renaiisance - for example, Tim Parks has just come up with Teach Us To Sit Still - basically healing himself (from an undiagnosed stomach complaint) through meditation. Funnily enough, my boss has just recommended me William Styron's Lay Down in Darkness, about his battle with depression.