Alex Preston

Pithy and profound

The poet Don Paterson proves a past master in his latest collection of aphorisms, The Fall at Home

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to the University of Berlin in 1933, Cioran was an avid supporter of both the Nazis and the Romanian far right group, the Iron Guard. His writing is bleakly nihilistic, his titles a hint to what lies within: On the Summits of Despair, A Short History of Decay, The Trouble With Being Born. Cioran was perhaps the greatest 20th-century practitioner of the aphorism, that ancient, fusty, patrician form associated with Hippocrates, Erasmus, de la Rochefoucauld and Pascal.

Viewed in a certain light, though, a kind of mordant humour begins to emerge from Cioran’s writing. It’s hard to read pensées such as ‘We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything’ without the creeping realisation that the author is having a bit of fun with the public perception of his work. It’s this humour — dark, self-mocking, corporeal — that self-confessed Cioran fan Don Paterson channels in his hugely enjoyable collection of aphorisms, The Fall at Home.

It takes a degree of chutzpah to pen a single aphorism, let alone a collection. It’s a form that presupposes the author’s wisdom and his (there are tellingly few female aphorists, pace Dorothy Parker) right to bestow it. In the wrong hands an aphorism can either feel hectoring and judgmental or bloodless and obvious. Paterson’s book, which brings together selections from his three previous collections of aphorisms and a good deal of new material, offers the reader a bracing combination of the profound, the comic and the often hilariously self-revealing.

Paterson arrived on the poetry scene with the equally gifted Simon Armitage in the early 1990s, a kind of versifying Baddiel and Skinner.

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