Pikaia's Den

10. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote [1605-1615]

Any plot?

Alonso Quixano, an ageing gent obsessed with books of chivalry, decides to become Don Quixote de la Mancha, and embarks on a series of quests for a love he names Dulcinea del Toboso (an oblivious farm girl called Aldonza Lorenzo). Joining him are his skinny horse Rocinante and his squire, a short and stupid neighbour called Sancho Panza.

Unique selling point?

Epic farce, and a spoof of quest novels of the day, Don Quixote is one of the most influential works written in any language. Quixote's seeming blindness to reality and his enduring pursuit of a pointless goal even spawned a new word - quixotic.

Best character?

Sancho Panza. The interplay between the high-minded knight errant and his bewildered, cowardly squire can only be read with a smile on one's face.

Sample line?

'Don Quixote had not gone very far when it seemed to him that from a dense wood on his right there emerged the sound of feeble cries, like those of a person in pain, and as soon as he heard them he said: "I give thanks to heaven for the great mercy it has shown me in so quickly placing before me opportunities to fulfil what I owe to my profession, allowing me to gather the fruit of my virtuous desires."'

9. Flann O'Brien- At Swim-two-birds [1939]

Any plot?

A young student, when not being bothered by his uptight uncle, is writing a stories about a writer, Trellis, who in turn is writing stories about characters from Irish myth. Until one day Trellis' characters rebel against him, and one is nominated to write a novel in which Trellis is put on trial.

Unique selling point?

Very Irish, very funny, and totally ingenious in its construction. A novel about a novel about a novel about a novel... Brilliant. But don't just take my word for it: 'This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl.' - Dylan Thomas. 'That's a real writer, with the true comic spirit.' - James Joyce.

Best character?

Orlick, the result of an illicit tryst between Trellis and Sheila, one of his characters.

Sample line?

'I surveyed my uncle in a sullen manner. He speared a portion of a cooked rasher against a crust on the prongs of his fork and poised the whole at the opening of his mouth in a token of continued interrogation.'

8. Martin Amis - London Fields [1989]

Any plot?

Failed writer Samson Young, arriving from America, can't believe his luck when Keith Talent - rogue extraordinaire, darts enthusiast and illegal taxi driver - invites him to the Black Cross pub. There he will meet the real life characters who might just provide him with a bestseller.

Unique selling point?

A dazzlingly well-written book by Amis, he throws everything he's got at the prose in this one. But that's not all - Keith Talent, Nicola Six and Guy Clinch are three of his all-time best characters, the postmodern plot weaves this way and that, and there is a laugh on almost every page.

Best character?

It has to be Keith. If he's not describing his undying devotion to darts or bedding one of his string of damaged women, he's boasting luridly in the Black Cross.

Sample line?

'But there were also rumours, legends, about an incident at a party, an incident involving Keith and Chick's sister, Charlotte Purchase. Some spoke of improper suggestions; others, of attempted rape. Whatever the truth of the matter, Keith, fresh out of hospital after a daring raid on a rival's drugs pub, had been promptly rehospitalised by Chick. Looking back on it now, with mature hindsight, Keith said that it was all crap about the attempted rape (which, he claimed, had been an unqualified success), and that a darker tale lay behind the enmity, something of which a man might not easily speak. At the bar of the Black Cross it was generally agreed, in fearful whispers, that the two men had fallen out over a disputed darts score.'

7. Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire [1962]

Any plot?

The final work by poet John Shade, entitled Pale Fire, finds its way into the hands of haughty Charles Kinbote. Presenting the poem in full, Kinbote also provides an extensive commentary and notes, which suggest, fantastically, that Shade's poem was actually about him - an exiled sovereign from the kingdom of Zembla.

Unique selling point?

A book that can be interpreted so many different ways, and a concept that explores the very nature of fictional worlds. A work that only improves upon rereading. The best novels are those with no analogue, no comparator, and Pale Fire falls squarely into that category. 

Best character?

Whoever Kinbote really is, he's a marvellous creation, the equal of a Humbert or a Hermann.

Sample line?

'Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic: my gray-haired friend, my beloved old conjuror, put a pack of index cards into his hat - and shook out a poem.'

6. Franz Kafka - The Trial [1925]

Any plot?

Joseph K is arrested by two agents for an unspecified crime. He is told to await further instruction, and his life becomes a nightmare of uncertainty and confusion as he tries to get to the bottom of an inexplicable legal process.

Unique selling point?

The most unsettling work in fiction. Kafka's writings all take place in a world where frustration is waiting at every turn.

Best character?

There's something special about Kafka's women. I find their portrayal fascinating, and believe in them lie clues about Kafka and his tortured, brief relationship with life. Leni, with her webbed hand and obsession with the accused, is no exception. 

Sample line?

'Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.'

5. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita [1955]

Any plot?

Humbert Humbert gives an account of his perverted affair with twelve-year-old Dolores Haze, or Lolita.

Unique selling point?

Sumptuously written, highly controversial, and, for better or worse, one of the most carefully drawn and entertaining monsters ever to grace the pages of a novel.

Best character?

Humbert: the mind of a paedophile; the pen of a genius.

Sample line?

'I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?'

4. Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time [1913-27]

Any plot?

Marcel, upon tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea, is taken back to his childhood. So begins his odyssey of the memory, and the story of his life.

Unique selling point?

It might seem odd to list a book I've only half-read - three volumes of seven - here. But three books of In Search of Lost Time amount to the best part of 1,500 pages (more than War and Peace), which is ample to make an assessment. So far, it's a gorgeous, profound look at life, time and memory. Many lines, many thoughts, are so true they become part of you. Truly, a life-changing work.

Best character?

Albertine, Marcel's elusive love.

Sample line?

'But, when nothing subsists from a distant past, after the death of others, after the destruction of objects, only the senses of smell and taste, weaker but more enduring, more intangible, more persistent, more faithful, continue for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruins of all the rest, to bring without flinching, on their nearly impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.'

3. Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet [c 1910-1935]

Any plot?

Bernardo Soares, a lonely Lisbon assistant book-keeper, dies, leaving behind scraps of paper containing his few experiences and many thoughts.

Unique selling point?

In any obvious sense, this is not even a novel: it's formless, unfinished and relentlessly autobiographical. Yet, on the other hand, it is a novel - maybe the novel to end all novels. Behind the veil of fiction, so sheer as to be almost invisible, the fragments in the book represent everything a single man thinks and believes. It is a heartbreaking tale of disillusion and perceived inadequacy. There are delicate ironies and paradoxes: in several passages Soares bemoans the impossibility and futility of writing - in a book of beautiful, poetic prose. He bemoans life's lack of redeeming features, but the few experiences that do redeem existence, redeem it completely. If the novel as an art is about holding a mirror up to life, then this is the form's pinnacle. After all, here art meets life - just as Bernardo died leaving his life on scraps of paper, so the little-known Pessoa died leaving The Book of Disquiet in a chest that might never have been opened.

Best character?

Bernardo is not merely a character: he's a man; a tragic, wonderful man. He's Fernando Pessoa.

Sample line?

'I'm convinced that in a perfect, civilised world there would be no other art but prose. We would let sunsets be sunsets, using art merely to understand them verbally, by conveying them in an intelligible music of colour.'

2. Vladimir Nabokov - Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle [1969]

Any plot?

Van and Ada, cousins, siblings, meet on the family's country estate and there begins a life-long love affair.

Unique selling point?

Nabokov, a master stylist, surpasses even Lolita and Pale Fire with this piece of phenomenal, lyrical prose. The action takes place on a whole other world, Antiterra, a fantasyland where every scene occurs against some kind of picture postcard backdrop. Ada is Nabokov's homage and also his gift to literature - it's his Tolstoyan novel, his Joycean novel, his Proustian novel. But, most importantly, it's his foremost Nabokovian novel.

Best character?

Van Veen; he's dashing, witty, athletic and intellectual. Odd that, given he narrates this fairytale.

Sample line?

'Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang of the original joy his falling in love with Ada. Memory met imagination halfway in the hammock of his boyhood's dawns. At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours between shallow sleep and the first pill of the day. Take over, dear, for a little while. Pill, pillow, billow, billions. Go on from here, Ada, please.'

1. James Joyce - Ulysses [1922]

Any plot?

Leopold Bloom walks around Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Unique selling point?

A vast book at once about so little and so much. A single day in an unremarkable Dubliner's life is the framework for a work which redefined literature. And that was the point. So life's not glorious. Who cares? Literature can be. In Ulysses, Joyce manages to take language places it's never been before - or since - while retelling one of the most important stories of all time, Homer's Odyssey. Also in there are a plethora of literary and historical references, sex, and lots of humour. And this was the key modernist text, a manifesto for an unattainable future, the future we gave up on after the Second World War. Life's grimy, mundane and sordid. But we could have had it so much better. We could have it so much better.

Best character?

Stephen Dedalus. After becoming an artist in A Portrait , Joyce's alter-ego appears at the beginning of Ulysses and is a wispy, thoughtful presence throughout.

Sample line?

'Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

What? says Alf.

Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.'

20. Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary [1857]

Any plot?

Charles Bovary, a simple, good man, marries beautiful Emma. She, wrapped up in her fantasy world of romantic novels, thinks there must be more to love than this.

Unique selling point?

Impeccably written, closely-observed study of womankind and the illusions of love, laced with humour.

Best character?

You've got to have sympathy for Emma. She wants what we all want - love and a life worth living.

Sample line?

'Charles slumped into his armchair, bewildered, wondering what was wrong with her, imagining some nervous ailment, weeping, and sensing vaguely circling around him something noxious and incomprehensible.'

19. Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveller [1979]

Any plot?

You buy a book and begin reading. But the same chapter is repeated endlessly. You take it back to the shop. The replacement is a different book. You read that instead.

Unique selling point?

A book about trying to read a book. The main character is 'you' and the narrative is written in the second person. Gradually, though, it seems this book is about more than reading. It's about her.

Best character?

Me. You. This is the only time we'll be the protagonist of a book, so let's grab it with both hands.

Sample line?

'You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room.'

18. Andrei Bely - Petersburg [1913]

Any plot?

Nikolai is given a bomb with which to assassinate a senior government figure - his father.

Unique selling point?

Playful narrative - Petersburg is considered the Russian Ulysses - Gogolian humour, an exploration of colours, dreams and the nature of literature. And, fittingly, the foggy streets of Petersburg leap from the pages of this eponymous book.

Best character?

Likhutin. His attempt at suicide is a masterly comic set piece.

Sample line?

'The author, having once displayed these pictures of illusions, ought quickly to remove them and break off the thread ofthe narration with this very sentence; but... the author will not behave like this: he has sufficient right not to do so.'

17. Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin [1957]

Any plot?

Timofey Pnin, who's never quite got to grips with the English language or American culture, has a habit of getting himself in pickles. But his tale is about more than farce, and the real Pnin is more than just an awkward academic.

Unique selling point?

Pnin is a marvellous comic creation, in this, the funniest of Nabokov's novels. Yet the book is also one of Nab's most accessible forays into metafiction and postmodernist narration.

Best character?

Pnin.

Sample line?

'[The conductor] presently was shaking his head over Pnin's ticket. The Cremona stop has been abolished two years before.

'Important lecture!' cried Pnin. 'What to do? It is a catastroph!'

16. Martin Amis - Money [1984]

Any plot?

John Self, an ignorant slob, jets back and to between London and New York, hoping to direct his first film. In between drunken binges he meets a writer called Martin Amis and receives menacing phone calls.

Unique selling point?

Satire on Eighties greed and commercialism, written in Amis' knowing recreation of lowlife-esque prose.

Best character?

Martin Amis is a lofty and arrogant presence, strolling about and 'living like a student', John claims.

Sample line?

'I should have realised that when English people say they can play tennis they don't mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Americans mean they can play tennis.'

15. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera [1985]

Any plot?

Fermina rejects Florentino and marries Juvenal. Florentino lives a life of adventure and trysts, but when Juvenal falls and dies, he might be able to win back Fermina.

Unique selling point?

Marquez meditates on love, life and death, without succumbing in the slightest to sentimentality. This is real. Here is feeling, here is desire. Maybe, here is love.

Best character?

Florentino is so hopelessly romantic he spends his life suffering for the simple want of a woman.

Sample line?

'Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months and four days ago. He did not have to keep a running tally, drawing a line for each day on the walls of a cell, because not a day had passed that something did not happen to remind him of her.'

14. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita [1967]

Any plot?

The Devil turns up in atheistic Moscow, causing all manner of disruption and destruction. Then there's the Master, the author of a rejected fictional account of Pontius Pilate's meeting with Jesus, now confined to an asylum, and Margarita, who he loves.

Unique selling point?

Magical romp, featuring a talking demon cat, literary snobs and plenty of black humour. Were that not sufficient, it's also an incisive satire on the Soviet Union.

Best character?

Behemoth, the large black cat with a penchant for chess, vodka and pistols.

Sample line?

'We do not know what other marvels happened in Moscow that night and we shall not, of course, try to find out - especially as the time is approaching to move into the second half of this true story. Follow me, reader!'

13. Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]

Any plot?

The novel describes the meeting of Tomas and Tereza, and their subsequent relationship, as well as scenes from the lives of Tomas' mistress Sabina, and her lover Franz, an unhappily married professor.

Unique selling point?

The Prague Spring, lust, love, Nietzsche, postmodernism, the meaning of life. All in one novel. And the most sympathetically drawn character in this moving study of human life? Karenin the dog. 

Best character?

Tereza. Beautiful and intelligent, and desperately wondering how she should live a happy life.

Sample line?

'Tomas did not realise at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.'

12. Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman [1759-1767]

Any plot?

Tristram Shandy tries to write down the story of his life. But he soon finds life's too vast and complicated to be contained within a novel - it's volume III before Tristram's even born.

Unique selling point?

A long, long way ahead of its time with a superbly convoluted narrative, full of helpless digression and diversion. A comic masterpiece.

Best character?

Uncle Toby, who was injured in Namur and insists on recreating the battle with a scale model and figurines in his back garden.

Sample line?

'I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy. - Accordingly I set off thus.'

11. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five [1969]

Any plot?

Billy Pilgrim is captured during the Second World War and housed by the Germans in a slaughterhouse. He survives the firebombing of Dresden. He also travels through time. Or does he?

Unique selling point?

Vonnegut's trademark simple narrative is based around the conceit that Billy is unstuck in time - he lives his life out of sequence, experiencing moments in no fixed order. Also, Vonnegut was there at Dresden, and this is his most heartfelt novel, about the absurdity of war and of humanity.

Best character?

Billy Pilgrim. A likeable everyman.

Sample line?

'And even if the wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.'

30. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina [1878]

Any plot?

Floozy Anna embarks on an affair with Count Vronsky. Meanwhile, hard-to-please Levin falls in love with sweet Kitty.

Unique selling point?

Closely observed, skilfully written exploration of life, love and relationships. Don't bother with the last chapter.

Best character?

A tough one. Anna's infuriating, Vronsky never thinks enough, Karenin's a miserable old shit, and Levin gets in a fluster all too easily. It'll have to be Kitty.

Sample line?

'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'

29. Saul Bellow - Humboldt's Gift [1975]

Any plot?

Charlie Citrine describes his friendship with the poet Von Humboldt Fleischer and his own drawn-out divorce from a money-grabbing bitch.

Unique selling point?

Bellow gives his comic side a freer rein. But his characters remain as human as ever, and there are real touching moments in the book, particularly involving Charlie's lost love, Demmie.

Best character?

Renata, buxom sex-bomb on Charlie's arm for the bulk of the book. She's trouble.

Sample line?

'As deep as the huge cap of December blue behind me entering the window with thermal distortions from the sun, I lay on my Chicago sofa and saw again everything that had happened.'

28. Nikolay Gogol - Dead Souls [1842]

Any plot?

Mysterious Chichikov arrives in a town and visits a succession of landowners, offering to buy the names of dead serfs, saving their owners paying tax on them. What's his game?

Unique selling point?

'Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange.' - Viadimir Nabokov. Gogol has a cracking narrative voice, and his description and characterisation are superb. The second half of the book was never finished, but this is the funniest - and, for me, the best - of the Russian 19th century classics.

Best character?

Chichikov, who remains an enigma throughout.

Sample line?

'Come now, we're not talking about the living; God be with them. I'm asking for the dead ones... they're just dust, after all.'

27. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow [1973]

Any plot?

Too many to count. There's Slothrop, who becomes tumescent when V-2 rockets fly, a Pavlovian conditioned octopus, a dying race... And it's mainly set at the fag-end of the Second World War.

Unique selling point?

Over 400 characters, opaque, confusing stream-of-consciousness narrative, lots of sex. But it's never a mess - it's all intentional; everything in it matters (or seems to). The very opposite of a crowd-pleaser, and Pynchon must be applauded for that.

Best character?

For some reason I liked Roger Mexico. Maybe because he seemed the most normal person in the whole book.

Sample line?

'But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.'

26. Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night [1961]

Any plot?

Howard W Campbell Jr, an American living in Germany before and during the Second World War becomes a Nazi propagandist. Or is he an American spy? 

Unique selling point?

More or less a companion novel to Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night explores the same themes - the futility of war and the banality of 'evil'. Vonnegut was at his best when writing funny about the distinctly unfunny.

Best character?

Adolf Eichmann. Only a cameo appearance, but a cracker of a cameo if ever there was one.

Sample line?

'"Oh, I've been thinking a lot lately about my old boss, Paul Joseph Goebbels," I said. Arnold looked at me blankly. "Who?" he said.'

25. Patrick Sueskind - Perfume [1985]

Any plot?

Grotesque Grenouille is abandoned on the filthy streets of eighteenth century Paris as a baby. He is endowed with a unique gift - an extraordinary sense of smell. He becomes a perfumier, but what he craves above all else is the scent of an innocent virgin.

Unique selling point?

The translated prose is spare and elegant, the smells Grenouille encounters are evocatively recreated in words, and the whole work simmers with sexual tension.

Best character?

Grenouille is a disgusting but compelling character. The recent film of the book got the casting way out.

Sample line?

'She only wanted the pain to stop, she wanted to put this revolting birth behind her as quickly as possible. It was her fifth. She had effected all the others here at the fish booth, and all had been stillbirths, or semi-stillbirths, for the bloody meat that emerged had not differed greatly from the fish guts that lay there already, nor had lived much longer, and by evening the whole mess had been shovelled away and carted off to the graveyard or down to the river.'

24. Milan Kundera - Immortality [1990]

Any plot?

There are several plot strands. The most important involves Agnes, who Kundera dreams up after watching the gesture and smile of a woman at the swimming baths.

Unique selling point?

Beautifully controlled fragmented structure and a profound exploration of the meaning - and non-meaning; this is Kundera after all - of life.

Best character?

Agnes.

Sample line?

'Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual.'

23. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude [1967]

Any plot?

Seven generations of the Buendia family go about their business in the village of Macondo. Lots of strange things go on, and there are some secrets hidden in a book.

Unique selling point?

It's a phenomenal work. Feverishly imaginative, and popularised magic realism - a style where the fantastic is treated as mundane. 

Best character?

Jose Arcadio (the first). A bull of a man, little given to thought or introspection.

Sample line?

'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.'

22. Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman [1967]

Any plot?

An Irish oddball kills a man on the say-so of another Irish oddball, who he inexplicably shares a bed with. He then encounters some oddball policemen.

Unique selling point?

Very funny, very surreal, and a killer ending. This novel (Flann's second) was actually rejected and not published until after he died a rather bitter alcoholic.

Best character?

Policeman MacCruiskeen. Creator of a carved box containing an infinite number of progressively smaller carved boxes.

Sample line?

'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked.

'No,' I answered, stretching forth my hand to lean with it against the counter. The Sergeant looked at me incredulously.

'Are you sure?' he asked.

21. Saul Bellow - Herzog [1964]

Any plot?

Moses Herzog, his life collapsing around him, writes a series of letters to friends, family and famous people, which he never sends.

Unique selling point?

Bellow's most playfully structured novel and a great study of a man who just can't seem to succeed at life.

Best character?

Herzog. He's a thinker, not a lover.

Sample line?

'Herzog had Ramona. She was a lovely woman, but with her too there were problems, of course - there were bound to be problems.'

40. Franz Kafka - America [1927]

Any plot?

After a scandal with a maid, young Karl Rossman travels by ship to America. Numerous adventures, travails and misunderstandings ensue.

Unique selling point?

Kafka's first novel, lighter in tone and funnier than the other two (how could it be less so?).

Best character?

Delamarche the drifter. A deceitful, selfish shit of a character.

Sample line?

'Karl of course wanted to look at the room straight away but Clara exclaimed with impatience, raising her voice almost to shouting pitch, that there was plenty of time for that later and that he must come with her first.'

39. Jean-Paul Sartre - The Age of Reason [1945]

Any plot?

Mathieu finds out his mistress Marcelle is pregnant. Naturally, money must be procured for an abortion, but there's plenty of time along the way for philosophical musing.

Unique selling point?

Sartre wrote this work as a fictional counterpart to his seminal tract of philosophy, Being and Nothingness. The novel explores the nature of freedom.

Best character?

Ivich, Mathieu's philosophy student. Intelligent, thoughtful, a little insecure and, I have not the slightest doubt, very attractive.

Sample line?

'Boris had promptly understood: the individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.'

38. David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas [2004]

Any plot?

Cloud-shaped birthmarks, nested novellas... This is six stories in one book, with Mitchell aping literary styles and telling tales about the past, present and apocalyptic future. Amazingly, it does all knit together.

Unique selling point?

Style, style, style. It's probably the ultimate creative writing exercise. But don't let that put you off. It was readable enough to be a bestseller.

Best character?

Timothy Cavendish. Pretentious old English gent who contrives to get himself trapped in a nursing home to humorous effect.

Sample line?

'A trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, drift-netting the width of the pavement. I stepped into the road to avoid collision. But as we drew level they tore wrappers off their lurid ice-lollies and just dropped them. My sense of well-being was utterly V-2'd. I mean, we were level with a bin!'

37. Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim [1954]

Any plot?

Jim is in his first year lecturing history at a provincial university. To keep his job he'll have to keep Professor Welch sweet. But Jim's not really one for schmoozing - he prefers nipping down the pub. And, to throw another spanner in the works, he also fancies the prof's son's girlfriend.

Unique selling point?

Classic British comedy told in Kingsley's precise, no-pissing-about-with-gimmicks English prose.

Best character?

It's impossible not to side with Jim when he has to deal with a cock of the magnitude of Welch's son Bertrand.

Sample line?

'"Well, what's going forward, people?" Bertrand asked. He was holding Christine's wrist between finger and thumb, perhaps taking her pulse.'

36. Jose Saramago - The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis [1984]

Any plot?

Ricardo Reis returns to Lisbon after sixteen years practising medicine in Brazil. When he's installed in a hotel, the poet Fernando Pessoa, who was buried three weeks previous, comes to visit.

Unique selling point?

Fernando Pessoa wrote poetry under the guises of a number of heteronyms - distinct characters with their own personalities, all aspects of Pessoa himself. One of these heteronyms was Ricardo Reis. Saramago imagines Pessoa's creation outliving him by nine months (the period we are alive, but not alive, in the womb).

Best character?

Pessoa is everything he should be - elusive, profound and knowing.

Sample line?

'He recognised him at once, though they had not seen each other for many years. Nor did he think it strange that Fernando Pessoa should be sitting there waiting for him.'

35. Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March [1953]

Any plot?

Augie tells the story of his life so far, from its beginnings in a poor Chicago family. A picaresque, so the plot sees him meander here and there, with no real direction - a little like life, really.

Unique selling point?

Bellow's writing is so deep and so caring. Everything is so detailed, so real; yet words are never wasted.

Best character?

Thea, who decides she wants to leave America and train a hunting eagle, is a woman to be reckoned with. Too hot for Augie to handle.

Sample line?

'I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city - and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.'

34. Thomas Pynchon - V [1963]

Any plot?

Benny Profane is discharged from the US Navy and returns to New York. Herbert Stencil is searching for the mysterious V. Their lives gradually intersect.

Unique selling point?

A feast of digression and experimentation, a menagerie of characters, a puzzle with no solution. Pynchon pisses all over Kerouac and Burroughs. And his best was yet to come.

Best character?

Pig Bodine, who also appears in Gravity's Rainbow. He spends his time drinking, fucking and laughing like a hog.

Sample line?

'Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else.'

33. Georges Perec - Life: A User's Manual [1978]

Any plot?

There's a thread about a jigsaw, and a painting of an apartment block. But mostly this is story piled upon story, based on the lives of people living in a single fictional Paris building.

Unique selling point?

The narrative moves from room to room, spurring tales about all and sundry. Perec wrote under a series of self-imposed restrictions - for example, the story moves around the house according to the movement of the knight in chess - but it's best to forget about all that.

Best character?

Bartlebooth, a millionaire who comes up with the ultimate futile scheme to devote his life to. He travels the world for 20 years, painting ports and sending the pictures home. Back in Paris the paintings are cut into jigsaws. He plans to complete the puzzles, then have the colour taken out and the canvas shipped back to the ports from whence they came. Thus nothing will remain from 50 years of work.

Sample line?

'Rorschach's dining room, to the right of the large entrance hall. It's empty. The room is rectangular, about fifteen feet long by twelve feet wide. On the floor: a thick ash-grey carpet.'

32. George Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody [1892]

Any plot?

Charles Pooter's diary recounts a year and a bit in his oh-so-ordinary life. Highlights include the return of his layabout son Lupin, and the persistent difficulties caused by Pooter's idiotic friends Gowing and Cummings.

Unique selling point?

Hilarious. No, truly. Hilarious. Pooter is a magnificently self-important man, prone to gaffe after gaffe. Originally a column in Punch, the book also comes with pictures by Grossmith's brother Weedon, which are wonderful.

Best character?

Pooter is not just the best character in the book, he's one of the best of all time.

Sample line?

'Two shoulders of mutton arrived, Carrie having arranged with another butcher without consulting me. Gowing called and fell over scraper coming in. Must get that scraper removed.'

31. James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1917]

Any plot?

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, argues with his father and rejects Catholicism. Decides he will be an artist.

Unique selling point?

Stephen, of course, is James Joyce, more or less. That's one thing. Then there's the fact that Joyce here writes a normal-ish novel. It's easy to follow, yet written beautifully. But simply writing a story well was never going to be enough for Joyce, so he never bothered doing it again. He wanted to change literature and the world. With Ulysses, he managed the former.

Best character?

Stephen.

Sample line?

'Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'

To celebrate the addition of the 50th book to Tim's list of his favourite fictional reads, here's your whistle-stop guide to the Top 50. Don't moan if your favourite's not here - either Tim's not read it or it's just not much cop. Let us begin with books 50 to 41...

50. Malcolm Lowry - Under The Volcano [1947]

Any plot?

Alcoholic British consul Geoffrey Firmin welcomes his estranged wife and brother to his obscure Mexican town. Against the heady backdrop of the Day of the Dead festival, he might have a chance to rebuild his marriage and his life. But he just gets pissed.

Unique selling point?

Fractured, complex narrative and chaotic prose echo the state of drunkenness. Evocative portrait of small-town Mexico.

Best character?

Geoffrey. Based on Lowry - an impotent alcoholic fuck-up himself - he meanders about dolefully and is never able to resist another glass of mescal.

Sample line?

'The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert.'

49. Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [1979]

Any plot?

Erm... no, not really. Seven interlinked narratives, united by a focus on love, the nature of history, and Czech politics.

Unique selling point?

The usual Kundera cocktail - plenty of sex, philosophy and authorial playfulness.

Best character?

The Student. Suffering from litost (state of torment caused by realisation of one's inadequacy or misery), his girlfriend Kristyna tries to make him more cheerful by encouraging him to meet some famous poets. It goes well. But later she fails to explain why she won't have sex with him and runs away. Naturally, he ends up feeling quite a lot of litost.

Sample line?

'It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels.'

48. Magnus Mills - All Quiet On The Orient Express [1999]

Any plot?

Unnamed narrator gets some pleasant me-time in the Lakes before a planned motorcycle trip to India. Somehow, though, he finds himself agreeing to paint some boats and it begins to look doubtful whether he'll ever be able to leave.

Unique selling point?

Mills' audaciously spare prose, dark humour and ear for dialogue create an unsettling but very funny tale.

Best character?

Campsite owner Tom Parker is a marvellously impatient and brusque presence throughout the book.

Sample line?

"I thought I'd better catch you before you go," he said. "Expect you'll be leaving today, will you?"

"Hadn't planned to," I replied.

"A lot of people choose to leave on Monday mornings."

47. Martin Amis - Other People [1981]

Any plot?

A girl wakes up in hospital. She doesn't know who she is or what happened to her. She doesn't know what's right or wrong, or why people have sex. Eventually, she discovers everything, though she might wish she hadn't...

Unique selling point?

Amis wrings every creative possibility out of the amnesia premise and come the end of the novel leaves the reader wondering what the hell just happened.

Best character?

Wise-cracking lothario and ladies' man Russ. Beneath the bluster he wouldn't know where to begin with a woman - if only somebody would tell his balding housemate Alan.

Sample line?

'Mary speculated what her own clothes might have to say on the topics of money and sex. Could clothes express a lack of one and a simple bafflement about the other?'

46. Franz Kafka - The Castle [1926]

Any plot?

K is hired as a land surveyor and travels to a village. When he gets there he's directed to the castle, where he'll be told what he's to do. But, try as he might, he can't actually get into the castle.

Unique selling point?

It was never finished, and of course it's Kafkaesque - but then that's to be expected from Franz. No, what makes The Castle special is that K finds a fiancee. Normally Kafka's women are alluring and problematic - but they soon disappear out of his tales . Frieda's presence is more enduring, and thus more enlightening.

Best character?

K. Like all Kafka's protagonists you want to give him a good kick up the arse, but that's what makes them special.

Sample line?

'Moreover, there isn't a single word in it showing that you've been taken on as a Land Surveyor; on the contrary it's all about state service in general, and even that is not absolutely guaranteed, as you know, that is, the task of proving that you are taken on is laid on you.'

45. Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle [1963]

Any plot?

A man wants to write about what important Americans did when Hiroshima was bombed. He ends up chatting to the children of Dr Felix Hoenikker, a founding father of the atomic bomb, and learns about ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the whole Earth.

Unique selling point?

A comedy about the end of the world. What's not to like?

Best character?

Bokonon, the founder of a nihilistic, humanistic religion. He decides the best way to further the faith is to outlaw it.

Sample line?

'Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.'

44. Vladimir Nabokov - Despair [1934]

Any plot?

Hermann Hermann happens to meet his double, who he finds sleeping on a park bench. This gives him the brilliant idea of faking his own death.

Unique selling point?

Hermann is a masterful creation. Deranged, deluded, arrogant - he's a delight to spend 176 pages with. Metafictional narrative illustrated Nabokov's burgeoning postmodernism.

Best character?

Hermann.

Sample line?

'If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvellous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness... So, more or less, I had thought of beginning my tale.'

43. Martin Amis - Time's Arrow [1991]

Any plot?

A Nazi war criminal's consciousness lives his life backwards after he dies.

Unique selling point?

You're kidding, aren't you? A Nazi war criminal's consciousness lives his life backwards after he dies?

Best character?

Since we inhabit Doctor Tod T. Friendly so completely throughout the novel, he's really the only character.

Sample line?

'I can't tell - and I need to know - whether Tod is kind. Or how unkind. He takes toys from children, on the street. He does.'

42. Virginia Woolf - The Waves [1931]

 Any plot?

A group of childhood friends alternately describe their lives in eery, oddly omnipotent monologues.

Unique selling point?

Somewhere in Woolf's delightful and poetic prose there's a novel about the human experience and the passage of time. The greatest work by a great Modernist?

Best character?

I have to be honest - by the end of the book, the characters all seem to amalgamate into one voice and one vision. Who's who is not especially important.

Sample line?

'The wave breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.'

41. Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin [1833]

Any plot?

Eugene, tired of aristocratic bores, inherits a country estate and goes to live there. Tatiana becomes infatuated with him, but Eugene doesn't think it'll work out.

Unique selling point?

It's a novel in verse. It's a poem. No doubt you'd have to be a Russian to really appreciate it, but Pushkin is nonetheless an enchantingly entertaining writer.

Best character?

Pushkin. Whereas Onegin is at times a brooding and frustrating protagonist, Pushkin as narrator shines brightly throughout.

Sample line?

My friend Onegin was begotten

By the Neva, where maybe you

Originated, reader, too

Was Vladimir Nabokov inordinately interested in young girls? Was he, in populist media parlance, a paedophile? And if he was, does it matter?

This week The Original of Laura, Nabokov's unfinished final work, has been published. We shall open with a word or several from the man responsible for putting the novel in fragments into publishable form:

How is it that one of the greatest, most seductive and most delightfully humorous of all 20th-century writers is so neglected? It's partly, I think, due to the public's tired association of Nabokov with butterflies and little girls. In other words, the notoriety of Lolita has blinded the public to Nabokov's other books and to the extraordinary range of his subjects and styles.

- Alexis Kirschbaum, editor of The Original of Laura

But for Martin Amis, a Nabokov fan who considers Lolita the greatest of all books, Laura poses a threat to Nabokov's reputation not because it's unfinished and might show signs of a master in decline, but because it revisits the despoiled young girl theme - the book includes a certain Hubert H Hubert character with an interest in pre-teens and descriptions of 12-year-olds' breasts.

Amis points out that lusted after young girls feature in four of Nabokov's other works (not including Lolita). See a pattern emerging? He steers clear of calling Nabokov's theme paedophilic. He calls it nympholeptic - relating to desire for the unnattainable. Accepting the argument that fiction is fiction, Amis is still uneasy:

One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov's mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.

I think Martin Amis is brilliant. I've read all his books, and he introduced me to Nabokov. It's said he's the only person living who's come anywhere close to reading every novel in the history of novels. I enjoy his literary criticism. In short, Amis knows about books. He knows about writing.

So it's fascinating to learn there's something about which we strongly disagree. I refer to his opinion on Ada (that incontinent splurge). Not only does he rubbish the work as a piece of art, he claims it exemplifies Nabokov's nympholepsy:

In Ada nabobism disastrously combines with a nympholepsy that is lavishly, monotonously, and frictionlessly gratified. Ada herself, at the outset, is 12; and Van Veen, her cousin (and half-sibling) is 14. As Ada starts to age, in adolescence, her tiny sister Lucette is also on hand to enliven their "strenuous trysts". On top of this, there is a running quasi-fantasy about an international chain of elite bordellos where girls as young as 11 can be "fondled and fouled". And Van's 60-year-old father (incidentally but typically) has a mistress who is barely out of single figures: she is 10.

Interminable, Amis says. Waterlogged corpse, he says. Put it down after a single chapter first time he tried it, he says.

I must declare my position here. In a list elsewhere on this site, I include Ada as my second favourite novel. I actually bought a copy for someone. And I think she agreed with Amis. Don't I look silly now.

We'll return to discuss Ada in a moment, for I think there the crux of this matter lies.

Amis points out that what's at stake is aesthetic rather than moral. Nobody's suggesting any of Nabokov's thoughts were manifested in action beyond fiction. Crime writers aren't criminals. But can an objectionable theme diminish the beauty of art? Did anything Nabokov thought affect the quality of his work?

I think Amis has fallen for a red herring in noting six works with nympholeptic (we shall indulge Amis by using his term) tendencies. Quantity is not the issue. I count six Nabokov works where murder or attempted murder takes place. And Amis himself has drawn two characters notionally attracted to minors - Keith Talent in London Fields pays for sex with special (underage) Debbie; Xan Meo in Yellow Dog finds himself having lustful thoughts about his own young daughters.

Which are Nabokov's nympholeptic works? There's Lolita, of course. Amis points out that the book is not sympathetic towards Humbert; Lolita is not a book revelling in the sexual exploitation of a young girl, it's the complete opposite. There's The Enchanter, a book I've not read but which is, by all accounts, an early draft of Lolita. So we can dismiss those two.

Look at the Harlequins! is effectively a parodic autobiography. The narrator is a Nabokov-like figure and the parts featuring a relationship with a young girl can best be seen as a poke at those who wrongly conflated Nabokov with his fictional narrator in Lolita.

The supposed nympholeptic references in Transparent Things are barely worth mentioning. Fleeting, and, in context, not particularly shocking. The Original of Laura, I've not read.

We're left with Ada. Contra Amis, Nabokov liked Ada. I believe he considered it the best book he'd written in English. Better than Lolita, better than Pnin, better than Pale FIre. That's some accolade. Can it be as bad and as worryingly nympholeptic as Amis believes?

The first chapter's the least readable of the lot. The book's long. It's self-indulgent, complex, wordy, overtly-intellectual and full to bursting with literary references.

But it's also achingly beautiful. It's Nabokov at his most Nabokov, spraying about alliterations, vivid imagery and sparkling sentences. It's wonderfully, postmodernistly playful (there are references to Nabokov's own novels squirrelled into the story). It's a glorious homage to the great Russian works by the likes of Tolstoy and Pushkin.

And, whatever Amis says, it's not unreadable - any comparisons to Joyce's Finnegans Wake are wholly unjustified. (Joyce's great Ulysses is a bugger to read. But I've flicked through Wake and attempting it doesn't bear thinking about. Absolutely impenetrable.)

Ada takes place on a kind of parallel Earth, called Antiterra. Some people on Antiterra believe there is a place called Terra (our Earth) where one may or may not go when one dies. So, for a start, this is not our planet, and the characters are not necessarily bound by our moral codes.

Which may be why it never seems wholly unusual that Van Veen (our narrator, for the most part) falls in love with his half-sister Ada soon after the novel begins - when he is fourteen and she is twelve. Both are privileged, precocious brats, for want of a better description. Not innocent children. And it is love they feel for each other. Without giving away the rest of the novel, it's a love that never fades in either of them to their dying days. Lucette, too, Ada's younger sister, is in love - tragically, with Van.

Ada is about love, time and mortality. It's a beautiful book about the nature of life by an ageing writer at the peak of his powers.

Is it nympholeptic? Probably, if we're using Amis' definition. Ageing Van (ageing Nabokov?), nearing the end of his life, recounts the history of his great love (Ada; Nabokov's wife Vera?). And he pines for his lost, never-to-return, unattainable past. In a sense, Ada is Nabokov's Proustian book.

But it's never mawkish. It's always knowing, and edgy, and dangerous, unlike so many love stories. Nabokov knew exactly what he was doing with Ada. Everything he chose to include is there for a reason. The paedophilic bordellos (with more than a hint of Ancient Greece about them), Van's pederast of a father, the almost disgustingly affluent lives of Van and Ada's family and acquaintances.

Love isn't perfect. People aren't perfect. This is the other message in Ada. Maybe Nabokov wasn't perfect - maybe he did spend his later years dreaming of fresh teenage flesh. Maybe everyone does.

However, the bottom line is that this did not impair his artistry. Amis sees Ada as the fly in the ointment; the book where Nabokov let rip and exposed some unpleasantness sitting deep within, to the detriment of his writing. But he's wrong. And the reason he's wrong is that Ada is a wonderful, vast success of a book, not the turkey Amis claims. Whatever's in The Original of Laura, the book Nabokov wanted burning, the rest of his novels are aesthetically perfect. And that means anything Nabokov thought or dreamt about is of no relevance to any discussion of his work.

I fell in love this summer.

Emerging from the sea, he stood and shook his head like a shaggy dog, showering the breaking waves at his feet with droplets of salty water. Then he strode up on to the beach, sinking into the sand with each footstep. His blond hair, falling about his ears and down his neck, shimmered in the sun.

The man lay right beside me, without even a towel. His back must have been covered in sand. I noticed he looked a little like me, but the resemblance was incomplete - he was tanned while I was pale; he was toned where I was flabby.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'Why are you lying so close to me?'

He turned, looking startled. 'Oh.' he said. 'I didn't see you there.'

I found that very hard to believe, given that I'd been sitting up looking out over the seascape. But he sounded like he genuinely meant it. He lay back, unperturbed, and closed his eyes.

They were blue, his eyes. Bright blue against his skin and his hair. Then I couldn't help but look at the lurid white hairs on his legs and arms. I wondered how long he'd been sunning himself - clearly he wasn't from that part of the world. I thought for a moment about how I would look if I spent weeks and months lying prone, catching the rays.

I felt uneasy lying so close to him; I felt inadequate and inferior. Peering about, I wondered if anyone was looking over at us, and considered they might have thought we knew each other. For some reason that bothered me.

Beads of sweat began forming on his forehead, and dripped down the side of his face. Also, there was a pool of sweat in his navel. Something then snapped - I realised I could no longer sit there beside him in silence.

'Have you been here long?'

His eyes opened. Calmly, he blinked. 'Here?' he said. 'What do you mean by here?'

I didn't really know what I meant. 'Uh. Here. This place. This beach?'

He blinked again and smiled. 'Not so long.'

That was his answer. That was all he was going to say.

'On your own?' I added.

He sat right up and looked out towards the horizon. The sun was beginning to fall lower in the sky, but it was still hot. 'No.' he said. 'I'm waiting for someone.'

I nodded. I remembered work at that moment, and my heart sunk. I was dreading going back. Sitting again in that office, hunched over my desk, willing away the hours...

'Hey,' he said, 'I'm going back in the water. Coming with?'

I hesitated. I feel conspicuous in the sea. Everyone else is always so brown, and I'm always so... white. Plus, my hair looks silly when it's wet.

But I told the man Yes, and we both went swimming. He said my things would be fine; he said nothing would be taken.

He wasn't a particularly good swimmer, and that pleased me. In fact, our respective techniques, if I could go so far as to call them 'techniques' were much of a muchness. We swam for a buoy and he just edged me in the race - he was clearly a little fitter than me.

This is what unsettled me - he looked so happy and carefree. His eyes radiated enthusiasm and innocence. I know mine betray cynicism and pessimism. Walking out on to the beach again, I saw we were exactly the same height.

Almost as soon as we had sat down, she appeared - the one he'd been waiting for. She was beautiful, of course. Some people get all the luck. He took her hand and they kissed. She didn't seem to be able to keep her paws off him, and they began walking away.

As an afterthought, he turned back to me. 'Bye,' he said. 'Perhaps see you again.'

'Perhaps,' I said.

I didn't see him again. The whole memory now seems so distant it might as well have never happened. But it did happen. Now, and I hope this doesn't sound too odd, I simply wish I was him. I fell so in love with him, I want to live his life, and discard mine, like the empty husk it so surely is.

'The past, then, is a constant accumulation of images. It can easily be contemplated and listened to, tested and tasted at random, so that it ceases to mean the orderly alternation of linked events that it does in the large theoretical sense.'

- Van Veen in Vladimir Nabokov's Ada

Is memory the meaning of life? Or, to paraphrase a certain Czech author, is it the reason simply being is so unbearable?

Life's overwhelming. Human beings are programmed to find happiness (let's not beat around the bush) in members of the opposite sex. But each human being will only encounter an infinitessimal fraction of those members of the opposite sex. Love is, in one way, a fallacy. It's something we believe in to delude ourselves that we'd be better sticking with one person than forever wringing our hands about the possibility of finding someone better. Not that any of us are particularly good at maintaining that delusion - we just try to keep the doubts at the back of our minds (or jack the delusion in completely and actually look out for someone better).

In another sense, though, love is the most real happiness we're ever going to possess. Yes, it's a construct we foment and foster. But we human beings are very good at fomenting and fostering. Biologically, the highs of halyconic love (lust) are very real. Then it's just a matter of how long we can imagine we are in love, and what we imagine of our love. If you really want you can see something in someone that's not really there.

This is all very dry. Down to business. How can you live your life if it's eventually all going to end? Let's hear again from Dr Veen, one of my favourite literary characters:

'Philosophically... time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong. 'To be' means to know one 'has been'. 'Not to be' implies the only 'new' kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future.

Time is anything but the popular triptych: a no-longer existing Past, the durationless point of the Present and a 'not-yet' that may never come. No. There are only two panels. The Past (ever existing in my mind) and the Present (to which my mind gives duration, and, therefore, reality)... The future is but a quack at the court of Chronos.'

Van, in his nineties, is looking back over his life. In the novel, Nabokov uses chronological sections of decreasing length to represent the way time seems to speed up as we age. Since Ada was written in the twilight of Nabokov's own life, I'm inclined to see Van as a mouthpiece for his feelings.

I don't know what it's like to be old. But I'm worried about it. And a lot of that is down to the nature of memory, which Nabokov describes so well.

Imagine a good thing has happened. Then the good thing comes to an end. This isn't difficult to imagine; it's pretty much what life's made up of - holidays, relationships, days out. But the good thing lives on, as a memory. Is this good or bad? If a good memory is so good it's too painful to contemplate, because it can never be recaptured except in the mind, is that cause for despair? Or cause for joy that the memory exists at all?

In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, protagonist Billy Pilgrim is visited by aliens (a long story). They see time differently to humans - and so they see life differently. Without linear time, there is no past. Each moment always exists.

'If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still - if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.'

So, is finding happiness in memory just a question of perception? Possibly. Get your attitude right and you can see the good in things, and enjoy good memories.

But if we humans were liable to look on the bright side of things, we wouldn't need aliens in novels to cheer us up. No. I'm pretty convinced the irretrievable past is what will make growing old such a total ball-ache. It's what's going to make life unbearable in the long run.

How does this relate to love, our ostensible meaning of life? Love, of course, being a construct, can be pinned on to something that's objectively not really love. In retrospect one can put a person, a place or a state of mind on a special pedestal, just because it makes a memory feel better.

This is the second crux. We want to love our memories. This is the only explanation for the way we idealise and romanticise in retrospect. Unless we can't love a memory - if a memory is tarnished by subsequent events, or a memory (for example, a relationship) extends beyond halcyon moments into mundanity - then our every instinct is to love the memory more and more. And make it increasingly painful to recall.

Memory's one saving grace, in the end, might be this. Memory dies too. So when we grow old, just as we will lament the eventual loss of our body, the vessel that conveys us through our life, maybe we come to lament the impending loss of our memory, that repository of all that's been good and beautiful in our lives.

I've never seen fit to write about Formula One before. There was too high a risk of boring you. Watching it's an acquired taste. Asking you to read about it would undoubtedly be taking undue liberties with your time.

Today, though, I'm making an exception. I'm not promising this will be interesting. You don't like Formula One - it'll take more than a few exquisitely-worded sentences to make this bearable. So gird yourself. And let us begin.

Rubens Barrichello. My favourite driver. We've been together for sixteen years, through good times and bad. He's the smiley, short-arsed Brazilian who's partnering Jenson Button (the Brit winning all the races) this year. They're both driving the Brawn, which is arguably the fastest car on the track. One or the other should take the championship.

So it's rather painful to see Rubens lagging behind. I could plead bad luck for a couple of races, and in another couple Jenson drove superbly. Still, the season's young.

Then, last weekend, there was Spain. Rubens, the most experienced grand prix driver, put in some good work to set up the Brawn for the circuit, helping Jenson to pole, and netting third for himself. He then made a cracking start, snatching the lead before the first corner.

Rubens had stretched his lead to 1.5 seconds by the first round of pit stops. Jenson was to go in first, giving Rubens an extra advantage - another lap on low fuel.

Now here's the crux. Jenson was fuelled for a two-stop strategy - a change from the planned three-stop. It looked sensible. The other front-runners were doing the same and there had been a safety car period which saved fuel and pushed the first stop later into the race. Also, sticking to the planned three-stop would have put Jenson out just behind Nico Rosberg, who would not be pitting for a few laps.

All well and good. The same should have applied for Barrichello. Most importantly, matching Jenson would have left him in front and on the same strategy. As overtaking is so difficult at Barcelona he would easily have taken the win. 'Hedging', putting cars on different strategies to cover all bases, shouldn't have come into it - Vettel was too far behind to affect either Brawn.

So Barrichello should have gone two-stop - it was obvious. However, theoretically, three-stop was faster. I don't doubt that, providing traffic doesn't come into play. But traffic did - remember Rosberg? Rubens was fuelled short to sneak in front of Rosberg. It was not the optimum. Two longish stints on the better, soft tyres and a short stint on the hard tyres at the end would have been significantly faster. It would have won Rubens the race. But Rosberg was in the way. So why pursue a compromised strategy?

Because it was still faster, said team boss Ross Brawn. Rubens wasn't fast enough on his third set of tyres, so he missed the chance to jump Jenson, he claimed. Setting aside the fact that Rubens should never have been in a position to be relying on scorching lap times at that point of the race - he should have been on the two-stop - was this true?

My calculations, based on Rubens' lap times when he was on his previous set of tyres, suggest the best he could have done was improve by nine seconds before both drivers' final stops. He went into the stops eleven seconds behind and came out seven seconds behind. Nine seconds faster would have clinched the win.

But - traffic. Massa and Vettel were five seconds behind Button, sandwiched by the Brawn drivers, during that crucial stint. It was impossible for Rubens to take more than six seconds out of Jenson with them in the way, however fast he drove. He was doomed. This was not merely unlucky - you will be at the mercy of traffic on a three-stop. It could have been projected and predicted.

Ignore what Ross Brawn says: the compromised three-stop was a big mistake. The two-stop was the right choice. Rubens was hamstrung by his strategists - not a lack of pace on one of his set of tyres. Either someone was guilty merely of incompetence, or this was a concerted effort on the part of the team bosses to engineer a Button win. I'm not placed to say which.

'You know,' said a tadpole, lying prone on a mass of pond weed, warmed by the evening sun, 'I don't think life can get any better than this.'

His companion, also a tadpole, twitched his tail, which altered the position of his head, and allowed him a better view of the first tadpole we met. The second tadpole tried to effect a quizzical expression, but given his physical limitations, it came across more as a contemptuous stare.

'Are you kidding? This - as good as it gets?'

'Absolutely. What more does a tadpole need beyond warmth, food and infinite leisure time?'

'You call this food? This slimy algae-ridden weed?'

'You know, if you feel you're old enough, there's nothing to stop you eating larvae. As for me, I'm happy with weed just now.'

The first tadpole - why don't we call him Terry? - closed his eyes. He was truly contented.

'Terry, I'm talking to you!' said Tony, for that was the second tadpole's name. 'Open your eyes!'

Terry did as Tony had asked, though he was motivated more by the possibility of falling victim to a newt attack than any obligation to obey Tony, who, after all, was smaller than Terry.

'Do you have no idea what's out there for us? What the future holds?' said Terry.

Tony opened his mouth - it looked just like a yawn. 'I'm not that fussed.'

'You... Well, I'll tell you. We're going to grow legs. We're going to be able to see the whole garden - scratch that, we're going to see several gardens. You'll be able to hop anywhere you want. You'll be able to eat slugs. And we're going to have sex.'

'Sex?'

'Yes, sex.'

'What's that?'

'You know, surely? When a frog loves another frog? When they want to settle down for a spring and make some baby frogs?'

'Oh, you mean mating. I've thought about that. I don't think mating's really for me. I don't for a moment think it's going to beat lying in the sunshine.'

'What?' spluttered Tony. 'You have to mate, if you can. What else are you going to do with your life?'

'I thought I'd just take it as it comes.'

A fly fell into the water near the two tadpoles. It flapped its wings but that was no use. It just became wetter and would be unable to take to the air ever again. It would drown.

'What about your tail? Surely you can't wait to be shot of that and get some legs?'

'I like my tail. I think it's a good tail.'

'But it's not a set of legs, is it?'

'I don't need legs in the water. With my tail I can swim as fast as I like. This tail's served me well so far, and long may that continue.'

'You'll have to come out of the water.'

Terry thought Tony was lying. 'No I won't.'

'Yes you will,' said Tony. 'You will grow legs and you will need to leave the pond to find enough food to survive.'

'You're... you're making this up.'

'No I'm not. You'll be so big larvae won't even hit the bottom of your stomach. You'll need to find slugs, or large flies.'

Now Terry was convinced Tony was lying. What a cruel trick to play. Trying to scare Terry like that. Although Terry was as happy as he thought he would ever be, lying on that pond weed, in the evening sun, without a word he swam away, so he would not have to listen to Tony any longer.