Books: a book that changed me

SALLY EMERSON on Palinurus's 'The Unquiet Grave'

When did you first read it? I was 16 and pleased to find a book which dignified my melancholy. Subtitled "a word cycle" and loosely referring to the Trojan sailor Palinurus who fell into the sea when sleeping, it was written during the last war by the literary critic Cyril Connolly under the pseudonym of Palinurus at a grey, dreary period of his life and that of England. Its poems and quotations from European literature traced a journey from depression into an ability to live in the present.

Why did it strike you so much? At a time when I had had terrifying glimpses of the ordinariness of life, this book made it sound anything but and which fought for the dramatic, the romantic, the profound with glinting words. Ah, words, I thought, they can do anything, I want them on my side, battling on the page, unholy warriors. I liked his thundering summations on love, history, politics, art, religion, nature: "Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moisture they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialised of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable". Yes, I thought, he's right, being highly socialised is intolerable. I shall be what I want to be, as solitary as I wish. If Palinurus can be this bizarre and get away with it, why then should I pretend not to be? Other books had led me to the self that was waiting, around 18, Hans Anderson's Fairy Tales, The Hawk in the Rain, The Mill on the Floss, The Poems of John Donne, but this glorified commonplace book written by a lazy, depressed, overweight middle-aged man, shoved me sharply towards her.

Have you re-read it? Yes, over the years I've skipped through it occasionally.

Does it feel the same as when you first read it? Parts of it I understand less well than I did. With the arrogance of the teenager, I used to despise those who were happy. Now I find unhappiness much less interesting. His discontent at times seems spoilt and overblown. Other parts, chiefly about evil and about marriage, I only understand now.

Has it affected your own writing in any way? My latest novel in some ways explores one of his many throwaway remarks, that the pattern of our lives depends on the shape of our first true love affair.

Sally Emerson's new novel 'Heat' is published by Little, Brown at pounds 14.99.