The Portrait, Iain Pears

I am utterly addicted to reading. I have tried to wean myself off it, and sometimes manage for a week or even a month at a time, but it never lasts.

The problem is that my mood and thoughts are far too influenced by whatever book or magazine I am reading that day. Yesterday (Ian Pears, 'The Portrait') was a violent, vengeful kind of a day. My husband got his head bitten off (almost literally) for daring to question my mental arithmetic, before being ignored for the rest of the evening as I devoured the book.

Some brilliant ideas and phrases that I just wanted to record somewhere:

'It is the great curse of the portraitist, to be so aware of one's own decline. I have spent years looking at people's faces and bodies, know which muscles need to sag to produce that look of diminution in the elderly. I see a face and can trace the lines creeping across the cheeks and forehead, theway the eyes sink and lose their lustre. I have to see my fate every time I look in the mirror. I can foresee the future.'

'You become the weather you live in - I know it's a cliche, but I never realised quite how true it was. The drabness of the English climate produces drab people, wrapped up, desperate to keep the outside at bay. They wear an emotional overcoat throughout their lives and scowl upwards, wondering whether it is going to rain again ... it is not uplifting, to be enclosed by a feeling that if it isn't raining now, it will be tomorrow. And we Scots ... how can anyone understand colour when half the year it is only light six hours a day?'

'I had thought that directness spoke for itself, but hadn't realised that the English like their ritual and distrust plain speaking as somehow mendacious. Everything has a hidden meaning, does it not? And the more direct the speech, the more carefully hidden the true meaning must be, the more effort must be expended to understand what is really being said.'

'It's all very well being wedded to your art, but someone has to notice. Someone has to approve, or appreciate, or buy. No one is so sublimely confident that they can do without any applause, however faint and sporadic. But Evelyn rarely showed her pictures, scarcely ever sold one.'

'I know how hard it is to acquire good technique. I acquired mine by constant labour and study, year after year, day in and day out... To get what you want - exactly the effect you have in mind and no other - you have to have mastery, otherwise you are like a man trying to speak English with only a limited vocabulary. Unless you have that range, you end up saying what you can say, not what you mean. And once you do that you begin to tramp the road of dishonesty, persuading first others and then yourself that there is no difference between the two.'

'your son was sitting on your lap - such a good, devoted father you are - and dropped a glass on the table. It shattered and dozens of shards of glass spun across the table, onto the floor. The noise was remarkable. I remember. It didn't just break, it positively exploded... Some of the fragments scudded across the table towards you. And do you know what I saw?
Let me tell you. You moved your child - both hands around his waist - you moved him very quickly a few inches as you turned your head away. But not to safety; not out of the way of the shining, twinkling fragments. Into their path. You moved your own child's body so he would serve as a shield. Oh 'twas but a moment, but I saw it, although I forgot it immediately afterwards. It couldn't be right, could it?
...It doesn't make any difference. Or does it? Why do I feel that half a second cannot be erased by hours, days, years of different behaviour? Why is it that half a second gives the lie to a reputation for fearless courage and audacity. built up over so many years? Because it is the truth, and because the child knows it too. It is his inheritance from you, that moment.'

'I discovered that I could not even rush to the side of a beloved colleague and friend without thinking of myself. Not only seeing myself offering aid and comfort, but also feeling irritated because my working day had been disrupted.'

I won't try and analyse these quotations, because then this would feel more like an English essay than a blog.

I thought the book was fantastic, and it had this great section at the end - almost like the 'Special Features' option on a DVD - where they interviewed the author and gave his book recommendations.

I was particularly interested in his description of the ending. It felt like a 'twist' ending, but you 'guess' what's going to happen from quite an early stage. I found myself wondering whether I ought to feel critical of this (I didn't). Pears says, wisely:

'The Portrait is not a mystery. The whole tension of the book depends on building up emotionally to a climax, not on keeping the ending hidden'

I also wanted to keep a note of his Top 10 Favourite Reads, because I am returning the book to the library tomorrow...

• A Harlot High and Low byHonore de Balzac
• The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
• The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• The Bacchae by Euripides
• Tom Jones by Fielding
• The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• Dialogues by Lucian
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne
• The Maigret Books by Georges Simenon