I'll take the show-off

I finally got my Christmas Book Henry and George by Julian Barnes. Thanks Mum. It's great so far. Julian Barnes is possibly my favourite living stylist even if some of his books (such as, um, all of them probably)are a bit show-offy.

I think this says a lot about me though that the authors I adore, will read every word they've written even if I know in advance that it got bad reviews or is a just a muddy collection of letters or fragments of unfinished nonsense, the guys whose books I really really want to have to own and keep and preferably in hard cover, tend to be the show-offs, the guys with big vocabularies and lots of literary tricks and not much heart. I'm talking about you now, Anthony Burgess and you, Ian McKewan and you, Paul Auster and where are you going, Will Self?

Most of all I'm talking about Bruce Chatwin. I remember the day late in 1988 or early 1989 I finished Utz . It was Picador edition. I turned the last page with extreme satisfaction realising that it was his first novel and thought "at last, a new writer whose books will keep me entertained throughout my life." Soon afterwards, I found his next book The Viceroy of Ouidah and was enchanted that he seemed to know as much about Dresden as he did about the consequences of the slave trade on a West African country I'd never really heard of before. This book included a biographical note that he'd died. I've never been so sad about the death of someone I've never met.