He can’t defy Death but he can teach it a thing or two about treating women properly

He can’t defy Death, but he can teach it a thing or two about treating women properly, and frankly, even after decades of feminism, Susan just isn’t up to it. Death has to be brought up to speed on the meaning of love, which in human terms (or if love has been less than kind to you, Hollywood terms) is, if at all authentic, selfless and prepared to sacrifice itself for the beloved. It’s time to get out the paper hankies, for the music to build to a cardiac-arresting crescendo, and for the fireworks (unsullied by any Hitchcockian irony) to explode in great chrysanthemums of emotion.The life-enhancing frisson doesn’t last beyond the exit door, but this is none the less an enjoyably big, expensive and romantic film – quite as entertaining, with the same glossy good looks but with more wit and less dampness, than Titanic.Jenny Diski’s collected essays, ‘Don’t', are published by Granta Books.Gilbert Adair returns next week.. IF EVER there was a character in search of a novel, it is Sophie Calle. Her extraordinary life, though real enough, is quite literally the stuff of fiction. In Paul Auster’s book Leviathan she appears, thinly veiled, as the character Maria.

“Maria was an artist,” writes Auster, “but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly defined as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way Her work was too nutty for that … ”

Maria is an American, Sophie is French, but aside from a few novelistic embellishments, the bizarre adventures that make up Maria’s story are Sophie’s own. As with Maria, trying to pin down Sophie is a slippery task, in which fact and fiction, life and art mingle disconcertingly.
Sophie’s mother calls her an “original” – and she means it in the French sense of the word: odd, eccentric, a little touched. From an early age, Sophie had a propensity to create private games and rituals – holding elaborate funerals for her goldfish when they died, for instance. Not so strange in the imaginative world of a child, perhaps, but for Sophie the games and rituals continued into adulthood – to mark her birthday she would invite a number of guests corresponding exactly to her age, plus one. She would lock away their gifts, untouched, in a glass cabinet; the next year she would start all over again.

(Her mother, keen to subvert her daughter’s troubling behaviour, would regularly present her with large pieces of domestic equipment on her birthday. “I managed to get the vacuum cleaner in, and the TV,” says Sophie with a smile; as for the rest, she made do with displaying the manufacturer’s guarantees.) Once, with no discernible motive, she followed a stranger to Venice, and, in a blonde wig, tracked him through the streets, taking notes and photographs as she went.Years later, both these projects, and many more, would end up in the white space of a gallery, canonised as art, but that is not how they began. As Auster writes of Maria: “This activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it.”At the age of 45, and with a slew of international exhibitions to her name, Sophie Calle is still following her idiosyncratic compulsions. A show which opens at Camden Arts Centre in London next month celebrates the latest, a unique two-handed collaboration between Sophie and Auster, soon to be published as a book. The three-part volume, Double Game, is Sophie’s answer to Leviathan. As she explains: “I decided to turn Paul Auster’s novel into a game and to make my own particular mixture of reality and fiction.” In it she presents the episodes from her life which Auster borrowed to shape Maria, and in turn she recreates the additional artistic projects he invented for his portrait.