Near the end

The English editor Diana Athill discovered, once retired, that writing was what truly made her happy. She wrote novels and memoirs, and when she had already turned ninety, she published Somewhere Towards the End, a book with a very explicit title in which she reflected on old age and the proximity of death, among many other things. Athill's calculations were wrong, and the author lived another decade that allowed her to publish four more volumes.

Reading Somewhere Towards the End (in Catalan by Univers, translated by Mar Vidal; and in Spanish by Asteroide, by Regina López Muñoz) is like going to visit a smart, cultured, and fun grandmother, with an interesting and daring life and a wise and lucid outlook. These are the reflections of a long-standing editor, but they are also the confessions of anyone who knows they are reaching the end of their journey. Diana Athill speaks—without hang-ups or snobberies—about love and sex, religion, anti-racism, art, family and inheritance, motherhood, old age, and death. And, obviously, about writers and books.

In this last section, Athill asserts that, as a reader, she gradually set fiction aside (she only saves the classics and some stellar names like Sebald, Foster Wallace, and Alice Munro): "Age has made me fussy, like a person who has lost their appetite and is only tempted by very select delicacies."

Faced with the limitations imposed by old age, Athill sees a compensation: "You realize that nothing mattered in the deepest sense, so you can take it all lightly." Regarding death, she adopts her mother's sentiment: "I'm not afraid of fear, what scares me is dying."

Diana Athill did not have children; she became pregnant at 43 by accident (which as an old woman she considered unconsciously intentional), but she suffered a miscarriage that put her life at risk. The joy of having survived, she writes, helped her overcome the sadness quickly.

Her reflection on motherhood makes one ponder: "The fact that our body is designed to conceive means that many generations will have to pass before women are freed from the psychic patterns dictated by their physique, however simple the gesture of taking a pill may be; and there is the possibility that we will never be able to conquer this psychic freedom." Perhaps, near the end, things are seen more clearly.