Born in Montevideo of a British father and Uruguayan mother (exotic credentials, presumably, for some readers at least), Logan spends his peaceful childhood in that country before the family decides to move to England. Sent to boarding school there, he will make two friendships to last a lifetime. The unreliable, compulsively unfaithful Peter Scabius and the quiet and pragmatic Ben Leeping will appear, on and off, as the book (and Logan’s life) progresses towards its culmination; they function, in a way, as Logan’s reference points or coordinates through the years.

After leaving Oxford, our man embarks on a rather irregular career as a writer; in fact, art (although of the visual kind) will provide him with the means to earn his living when, years later, he manages his friend Ben’s art gallery in the U. S. His interest in literature and paintings is consistent throughout the book and leads him to meet several real-life artists, as well as a few imaginary ones. (Actually, the way in which Logan’s fictional life convincingly mingles with those of real people, and into the larger backdrop of his times, is one of the most attractive traits of the book, the best one being undoubtedly the personality of Logan himself).

But if Logan’s varied professional activities (which include not only writing and dealing in art but also espionage) are pursued in a somewhat haphazard manner, his emotional life is no less unstable. After some youthful affairs, he marries a wealthy girl he doesn’t really love, and soon finds himself a reluctant father, trapped against his will into an upper-class society he can’t endure. True love will come, eventually, in the form of passionate and intelligent Freya, very much his intellectual and sexual match, and of the daughter he has with her. But, as Logan learns through shattering grief, not even true love can be counted upon to last. His despair of ever finding the equal of the feelings he once experienced makes him fall into a downward spiral of abandon, drunkenness and loveless physical encounters.

As the book draws to its end, we have become so fond of Logan that we’d like to somehow forestall what we see is coming. His lucid introspection, resilience, and compassionate vision of other people’s predicaments have endeared him to us, like an old family friend we always feel comfortable around and who has, somehow, always been there. It was with a certain blurry sadness that I closed the book for the last time.

One especially withering review of this book criticized the fictional journals device; it stated that the best diarists’ immediacy and appeal derive from the fact that the events they tell of really happened - and that taking that away results in dullness. This amounts to insinuating that any attempt at depicting a fictional character’s life strictly in his or her own words and over a long stretch of time is doomed to failure. That assertion, which would in fact deprive literature of one of its most essential functions – that of creating lives, worlds, and events from the author’s imagination only – is hard to endorse with regard to this book. Much as I adore Samuel Pepys, I was much more hooked to Logan Mountstuart’s love life than to old Sam’s bouts with the Navy bureaucracy.