Bookshelf: The Fly Trap

So it’s a few weeks after a break up and naturally I turn to books for help and guidance. It was an experience I had never been through before, and I felt like few of my family members or friends could relate - because in my solipsistic state I thought ‘surely no one had ever felt as heartbroken as this before’. I found myself at the doors of the four floor Watersones on Piccadilly – my happy place. (Well, one of many, I’m pretty greedy when it comes to happy places.)

Yes, I had cried on the tube there, but now I was armed with a list of the ‘Best Books for Breakups’ and a disregard for how little money I had in my bank.

Truth be told, I talked myself out of most of the books on the list – either they were too specific, too irrelevant to my particular situation, or just made me feel even more of a sad sack for thinking that purchasing ‘Why it hurts and how to heal: a perspective on single life’ would actually make me feel better. I’m a big believer in literature, I devoted three years of my undergraduate life to the thing, but I’m not sure that self-help literature is for me. I’ve never quite found the elusive self-help novel that isn’t cheesy, isn’t general, and makes me feel like I actually can go out into the world as the wholly imperfect individual I am and achieve my goal of (insert anything here – trust me, it will have been written about by someone.) Fiction, on the other hand, now that’s a horse of a different colour.

Fiction is, to me, like a small shed at the bottom of the garden, painted white with beautiful throws and patchwork blankets on armchairs and benches, fairy lights, and a warm cup of tea. It is my hammock, I can relax with fiction, it has offered me a space to recuperate, to escape, to rebuild…most things I need can be found in that moment of complete absorption in a book or poem – the moment where nothing but the overwhelming beauty of the language and the story exists. (Hello there pretentious literature student hiding away in my mind, nice of you to join us for this post).

Anyway, I walked away from the bookshelves housing most of the books recommended to me by a very cursory Google search, and I wandered through the stacks of literature – hundreds of voices just waiting to be heard again, thousands of characters and delicious sentences. I ended up picking up three books: A Single Man (no prizes as to why this caught my eye), Bonsoir Trieste, and The Fly Trap.

Yes. The Fly Trap. A non-fiction account of an entomologist who has spent his life collecting hoverflies. Clearly, my post-breakup brain had decided to flee to the outer-reaches of sanity, and advised that this book would offer me solace and support in my heartache. So I bought a book about collecting flies.

But it’s non-fiction! But it’s about flies and you hate insects! But it will be bullied by the numerous books that reside on your bookshelf as a ‘silly-fly-book’.

Yes, yes, yes….I know. But it’s just so great. It doesn't try to be anything other than a book about a man who loves collecting flies, but it manages to be much more than this. It is peppered with phrases that so elegantly capture life that I’ve started to wonder if I should take up fly catching to improve my own writing. It’s incredibly pure and gentle prose, there is clarity in writing that pretend to be nothing other than what it is, descriptions of long Swedish summer evenings and the flora and fauna that comes along with them.

For me, the book was very calm and insightful, it left me longing for evenings filled with nothing but sitting in nature. And that’s what you have to want – meditations on life that emerge from stories about catching flies and people who have caught flies. Don’t come to this book expecting excitement in any thrilling way, it is an escape that you float into rather than getting sucked into it.  

I have always loved seeing or hearing of people who unapologetically and passionately love what they do with such enthusiasm that you begin to see why they do it – not necessarily their job, but their hobby – and The Fly Trap is full of such enthusiasm, it pours from the pages and calms your heart into truly believing that ‘each to their own’ is something you should live by.

Long Story Short: This book is warm and contemplative and humorous, it draws the readers attention to the beauty of the smallest things in life. I really enjoyed it but if you don’t like loose structure and quiet but thoughtful memoirs then it won’t be for you. Be open minded when you go into this book and you will probably find yourself going back to it again and again, to find answers to things in your life, or just to wistfully dream about nights by a lake catching flies - admittedly this is probably a very niche dream. I told you, pick any topic, someone will have written about it.