40

Forty
    When you read a novel, your age is up for grabs. Inhabiting the minds of characters younger or older than yourself, you can shed – or add – decades at the turn of a page. Read with care, therefore, o forty-somethings. For forty can be the onset of middle-age, or it can be the prime of your life. We hereby prescribe a collection of novels to accompany you at this
pivotal juncture.
    Perhaps you are in the midst of the career – or marriage – of your dreams, and everything is going swimmingly. In which case, are you taking it all for granted? Take a preventative tonic in the form of The Kindness of Women (J.G. Ballard) which shows how the past – or the present, for that matter – can
ambush your good fortune. Or perhaps you are secretly rooting for a crisis in either your work or your love life. In which case,
a daily measure of Seize the Day (Saul Bellow) will show you how not – and thereby how – to do it.
    Of course, marriage might not be turning out to be the
plain-sail you imagined. If so, take a spin in the company of someone else in the same boat, with A Heart So White (Xavier Marías). And if you’re on the outside looking in, dose up on May We Be Forgiven (A.M. Homes) for a shocking exposé of
a couple who had seemed to have it all.
    If you’ve dedicated your life – or career – to literature, rather than to another person, drink deep of The Debut (Anita Brookner) and ask yourself if it’s time you peeked out from beneath that pile of books. And don’t tell us you’re past it.
A forty-something woman is at her sexual peak, and the natural mentor of the younger man requiring initiation into carnal love – In Praise of Older Women (Stephen Vizinczey) will convince you if you’re in any doubt.
    Turning forty is the time to start doing the right thing in
life – whether that means caring for your elders even when they’re annoying – see The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck) for
a fine, conscience-pricking example – or taking a political stand: read Daniel Deronda (George Eliot) to galvanize your political self. But most importantly of all, it’s time to make sure the spirited child you used to be is still calling the shots. See Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man (Fannie Flagg) – or Jamie Byng – for a reminder. To reach your half-century with your soul intact, your mind still young, and your glass filling up by the day, medicate regularly with A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh) and we guarantee there’ll be plenty of friends lining up for your next big birthday bash.

    Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, authors of The Novel Cure

Forty Birds for Forty Years

    Simon Tofield, author of Simon’s Cat

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
    It’s one of the best-known stories in the world. And of course it comes from the great collection known as The Thousand and One Nights – or does it?
    According to Marina Warner in her book Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (Chatto & Windus, 2011), there is considerable doubt about the origins of this marvellous tale. Indeed, it’s likely that this story and the story of Aladdin were both invented by Antoine Galland (1646-1715), the first European translator of The Thousand and One Nights .
    But never mind that. It’s a superb story no matter who made it up. Ali Baba, the poor woodcutter, who sees a band of robbers enter a cave by means of the magic phrase ‘Open Sesame!’, and when they’ve gone discovers heaps of treasure in there – and then is persuaded by his greedy brother Cassim to tell him the secret words – and Cassim, once in the cave, forgets them and is discovered by the robbers, who cut him into pieces – and the tailor who sews them together – and the marks on the door and Morgiana the clever slave who fools the villains by marking every door – and the robbers hiding in the oil jars – and the boiling oil – what a tale!
    Whatever its origins, it soon went everywhere. The Brothers Grimm have a story called Mount Simeli that reproduces the first half of it almost exactly, but seems to know nothing about the robbers’ search for the house of Ali Baba and the splendid business with the oil jars. It’s been filmed in France, Bengal, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Japan, as well as by Walt Disney; and in bowdlerised and softened form, it’s sometimes made into a pantomime, though not as often as its ‘orphan’ companion, Aladdin . Too gruesome, probably. It awaits its perfect
performers: perhaps the creators of