In Gratitude
by Jenny Diski. Bloomsbury, 250 pp., $26.00
The epigram for Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica (1997), a typically uncategorizable mixture of travel journal, childhood memoir, and Melvillean meditation on whiteness and oblivion, was from Beckett’s Malone Dies: “I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject?” Beckett, alongside Montaigne, Nabokov, and Joyce, was one of Diski’s literary heroes. And Beckett’s bitter deathbed punning would have worked as an epigram for In Gratitude, too, as Diski herself observes. Now that the sound of Diski’s fierce, cool, prickly, noticing, and absolutely original voice has come to the end, it’s clear that she was always talking about herself, and, equally, that she was incapable of lying…