My book-addled brain.

A sample paragraph from 'A Case of Unreliable Memory':

To my weary, book-addled brain the name slippages did not stop there. As I put down my whiskey glass, put on my reading glasses and looked at the book again the names started to slide in front of my eyes. I felt myself to be like that hapless narrator, Mr Lockwood, as he watches the engraved names merge and separate in front of his eyes in Wuthering Heights (1847). As I watched, and read, and dreamed, Christie’s character Molly Preston-Grey got married and became Molly Ravenscroft only to then slide over into that most affirmative of women, James Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Yes, there is nothing to connect them; and yes this was madness, I knew, but I couldn’t stop it, me, sitting there that night, and there was the noise of the wind again, and the neighbour’s dog still howling won’t it ever shut up, like that dog down on the moors terrible and painted. I rubbed my eyes, trying to snap myself out of this overwhelming literary sickness, only I found that I couldn’t. For wasn’t Molly Bloom herself only Homer’s Penelope, that weaver of tapestries and texts? Yes, again yes. The fact that Mrs Oliver’s ‘christian’ name is Ariadne only seemed to support my adoption of this ‘mythical method’. But, I knew, it didn’t lead to anything, this unravelling of threads, this making up of connections, yarns and literary memories – it only lead me back into a literary critical labyrinth.