In the first year of this century, I was down and out in Prague, doing a bad impression of Orwell but without a book to show for it at the end. Skint and dislocated, I slept on a lilo in somebody’s hallway at night, and my shoes were so tattered that the laces had to be tied around the middle to keep the soles from coming off. I earned a few beer tokens teaching English, but nearly every other waking moment was spent drinking, reading and playing Scrabble like an obsessive with a fellow traveller. But reading most of all, and in dusty cafés – the sort that resembled a bohemian jumble sale of wonky armchairs and wobbly tables. This was a time before smartphones and American coffee chains. The internet was mainly for email at this point, and the devil was still workshopping social media. I didn’t realise at the time – nobody did – that these were the last days of a particular way of reading.
It was in Prague that I discovered the novel, or rather, …