Vacation

by Alan Sheridan

239 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1972

About the author

Born Alan Mark Sheridan-Smith, Sheridan read English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge before spending 5 years in Paris as English assistant at Lycée Henri IV and Lycée Condorcet.[1] Returning to London, he briefly worked in publishing before becoming a freelance translator. He has translated works of fiction, history, philosophy, literary criticism, biography and psychoanalysis by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget and many others. He was the first to publish a book in English on Foucault's work and has also written a biography of André Gide, plus two novels.

Reviews

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

An obscure British experimental novel from 1972, which I heard about at a conference on B.S.Johnson. Like Johnson's books, it uses the novel form to contain a collage of non-fiction and personal meditation, with little attempt at constructing a fictional world or plot. There is a framing device that this is notionally a reconstruction from found documents. The documents purport to show a week in the life of an insurance clerk taking a vacation from work in October 1967. He spent the time looking at the graves in Brompton Cemetery and studying other traces of death: recording a talk at the British Museum about Egyptian burial rites; reading Victorian travelogues that describe the different ways of death in China and Japan; creating a scrapbook from newspaper cuttings. Alan Sheridan was a translator of the latest French thinkers (Foucault, Lacan) and it shows in his concern about the cultural and historical variations in attitudes to the supposed certainties of human existence. Presence and absence and the fading away of the human trace in the modern world is another theme; the changing landscape of London between late 60s and early 70s is noted and might show some influence of the early "psychogeographical" ideas coming the Situationists in Paris. However neither the main character nor his editor impose enough personality in these pages, certainly not as much as Isabella Bird, the 19th century lady traveller. That's where this differs from Johnson's books: "Trawl", "The Unfortunates" and even the final collage-text of "See The Old Lady Decently" (which is the closest resemblance to this), all have the strong voice of their creator running through them. A voice which really put an end to itself when doubt and despair overwhelmed it.

[Michael Gould]

I met Alan Sheridan in 1972 when we were both living in Earls Court. He told me he had written Vacation, and I ordered a copy from the public library and read it. It was an interesting read, though clearly not destined to be a best seller. I always regretted not getting to know Alan any better.