[This review, first published in 2008, originally closed with the line ' "The Fourteenth Day: A Life of Hector Spinkël" is due to hit cinemas in 2009.'. Alas, the film never 'hit' a single cinema, and is still awaiting release...]
When the news came through, I was lying in the bath, eating a mango. My waterproof radio was set, as always, to Radio Gorky. It was five past nine in the evening and the incomparable Pyetr Blóf – whose voice has always reminded me of Harold Pinter speaking through a snorkel – was on the air. It was not the first of April.
To speak frankly, I’ve never really understood the obsession with Hector Spinkël. So far as I’m concerned, he was no more than another unsuccessful academic trying to make the big time by writing up his failures in a manner some might call comic. They say he was a child prodigy, but there’s precious little evidence of it, save all that tumbles from the mouth of his mother, who has so far outlived her son by twenty years. It seems much more likely that he was simply an odd child, whose natural dreaminess and distinct lack of social skills gave the impression that he must be wildly intelligent. Beyond getting a place at a decent university, he never showed any real evidence of the genius with which he is so often credited. That the very best of his ideas were never written down, as his mother claims, is a rather lazy excuse with which to cast a shroud over the fact that, all things considered, he was the owner of a somewhat average mind. Read the rest of this entry »
