returned to the library, unfinished

John Fowles, The Journals (Volume I: 1949-1965)

After taking six weeks to get through about one-third of this massive tome (the first of volume of two), I had covered only a little more than three years in the young adulthood of Fowles, who in the early 1950s was about as far as one can imagine from being the world-famous author of The French Lieutenant's Woman. To go by these published journals alone—which are but a fraction, its editor tells us, of the extant manuscripts—Fowles spent most of his time during this period complaining about his parents, whom he lived with after graduating from Oxford University; rhapsodizing about landscape; teaching school in France and Greece; mooning over a childish, mercurial young woman while on a trip to Spain; and claiming to be a misunderstood literary genius, despite very little supporting evidence. I admire his self-confidence, but I lost patience with the braggart Fowles was in his twenties and, as a consequence, will probably not bother to pick this book up again to see how he developed into one of England's finest contemporary writers.

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