Patrick Skene Catling
There are books one respects, books one admires and books one simply enjoys, without activating the steamy critical apparatus. Yours, Plum: The Letters of P.C. Wodehouse (Hutchinson, £16.99) made me smile almost as much as the old master himself used to smile over the second martini after having filled his daily quota at the Underwood. 'Six hundred words are not very many,' he told me. But if you write 600 words every day, the pages pile up, and every now and then you have a book.' Plum encouraged his juniors to believe that it is possible to be a writer yet happy. The Canadian chutzpah of Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler (Chatto, £13.95) gave me great pleasure. Not even the usual envy and acrimonious debate provoked by Booker short-listing could diminish the fun. P. J. Kavanagh's autobiographical travel book, Finding Connections (Hutchinson, £14.95), is an interesting examination of the author's residual Irishness, discovered in England, Ireland, Australia and his own navel.
Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. The Swedish Academy of Letters must have decided it was Egypt's turn. Palace Walk (Double- day, £12.95) is tediously long, and the thought that it is only the first part of his Cairo trilogy made me groan.
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