I'll show you the life of the mind

I read J D Salinger's story "For Esmé - with Love and Squalor" for the first time last week on my way home from work. At one point I felt a tear in my eye, when Esmé tells us her name, and you realise the story is written for her.

Then a few lines later I was laughing out loud.

What a story. It is great when you come across something as wonderful as this, and you want to shout from the rooftops.

Catcher in the Rye is in my top 5 all time books, but I had never read anything else by Salinger until last week.

"Esmé" is a masterpiece. A quite unbelievably brilliant and moving short story. Probably the best I have ever read.

It concerns an American soldier in WWII who meets a young orphan called Esmé and her brother Charles, and this, you figure out, is the story he writes for her as a wedding gift, a few years later.

Salinger has a singular and distinctive voice. His themes of childhood innocence, bright young things, and cynical and slightly fragile young men and women, just hit the spot with me, and he has inspired generations of readers since the 1950's.

I dispute the theory that it is only adolescents and moody teenagers who crave Salinger. I did not read Catcher until my late twenties, and now Esmé ten years after that.

Esmé is such a powerful and warm story. It was published in 1950.

It was so good, I re-read it the next day. And the next. And then I went an bought "Franny and Zooey", another Salinger book. Franny is a sublimely written story too.

(Looking back, I think the recent catalyst for this reading was my cousin Maria, whom I met for dinner in Madrid last week. She was shouting from the rooftops about Esmé years and years ago. Well ahead of the game, is our Pip).