The Rothschilds, the Spenders, the Queen...

The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and came to London half a century ago when still an avid young man. For 38 years he lived there with the late Nikos Stangos, a cosmopolitan of the Greek diaspora, whose father had been expelled from Bulgaria and his mother from Istanbul. Displacement and asylum were so much part of Stangos’s imagination that whenever he saw an old person in the street carrying a suitcase, tears came to his eyes. Stangos’s sensibility, zest and physical grace provide many of the richest moments in his lover’s diaries.

Plante began keeping this diary in 1959. He seems to reckon it as a London counterpart to the journals of the Goncourt brothers or those of the incomparable Count Harry Kessler: ‘A repository of what one day will be considered more than a personal diary, but an account of a certain time.’

Out of many millions of words,he has crafted an experimental amuse-bouche of a book, which is fascinating, muzzy and frustrating by turns. Instead of publishing his diary entries in chronological sequence, he has shuffled their order, discarded the dates and linked them with a retrospective commentary that is blurred with its surroundings. For a novelist this may resemble creative ingenuity, but for the reader it seems too arch. Although the year can often be divined from references to deaths, political events, book publications or art openings, the effect is of encrypting information or befogging a clear view.

The mists are thickest when Plante tries to characterise his exhalations:

In the end, whatever the end may be, my diary will have nothing at all to do with me, but on its own bulge with such a vast roundness that it will go on turning of itself.