The Reading Room: A blog about books

Salman Rushdie and the Indian Literary Festival: the Saga Continues

2012-01-26T14:29:00.000-08:00

‘He is a w**kerof the highest order. I am not at all sorry that the Indians have asked him tof**k off,’ the man delivered his verdict, chomping on the deep fried KFCchicken wings.

Let’sassume that the man was an Asian Muslim, liberal enough to masticate on non-halal meat at the KFC (powered down hisgullet by the 400 calories of milkshake which goes by some silly name I canneither pronounce nor spell) but not liberal enough to feel even a smidgen ofsympathy for the w**ker.

Let’s alsoassume that the man is of Pakistani descent, a country generally considered tobe the arch enemy of India. If you think the Brits and the French dislikeeach other, that is nothing compared to the animosity betweenthese two countries.

In usual circumstancea Pakistani can be trusted to tie a rock round his neck and lie down at thebottom of Thames than say anything that might have an outside chance of beingconstrued as praise for his country’s giant neighbour.

But not onthis occasion. The Pakistani (how I came to be sharing a table with him at the KFC is an interesting story, but not for this post) attacking the KFC zingermeal with the gusto of a Taliban attacking a US post in Vaziristan approvedwholeheartedly that the man addicted to solitary sexual pleasure was asked to find sex elsewhere by the Indians.

The w**keris Salman Rushdie, who was supposed to appear at a literary festival in India,but in the end did not because the Muslims clerics went apeshit over himspeaking at the festival, and the organizers chickened out.

Actually,that is not true strictly speaking. The organizers—William Dalrymple and SanjoyRoy—wanted Rushdie very much to attend. Indeed, at the first whiff of thetrouble—when a cleric from a Muslim seminary in India went public demandingRushdie not be invited—Dalrymple went into the kind of laudatory hyper-drive last heard when Barak Obama was elected as the US president (Yes we can!).

I can’t help feeling that it was a strategy doomedto fail.

Look at itthis way. Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, and incurred thewrath of ‘tens of millions of Muslims’, according to the Muslim cleric in India(and that is just Indian Muslims). He announced that Rushdie (himself a Muslimby birth) had insulted Islam and the Muslims will never forgive him.

Do you see?The clue is in the adverb ‘never’. The cleric said the Muslims will not forgiveRushdie. Not now; not ever. They will not forgive him on any occasion. Absolutelynot. Don’t even mention the word forgiveness: in no way the Muslims willforgive Rushdie. Absolutely not. Don’t bother, because we won’t bother. Don’teven mention it. We would rather swim naked in the Ganges with paper-cuts on our nipples than forgive Rushdie. We would rather eat our own snot thanforgive Rushdie.

And whatdoes Dalrymple do? He calls Rushdie one of the greatest Muslims to have comeout of India who had contributed to humanity more than Gandhi. Therefore—so wentDalrymple’s argument—Muslims should welcome Rushdie with open arms and presshim to their metaphorical armpits.

Not aclever thing to do, if you ask me.

PerhapsDalrymple was hoping to appeal to the better nature of the Muslim cleric. Thereinlay his second mistake: these guys don’t have one.

Since itwas not Dalrymple’s intention to piss off the Muslim cleric who was alreadyhopping mad that Rushdie was invited for the festival, I can only assume thatthe man is extraordinarily naive. Howdid he think the cleric was going to respond to his heart-wrenching appeal? He(the cleric) was hardly going to say, ‘I am so sorry! What was I thinking? Ofcourse! Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest Muslim figures to have emergedout of the Indian Muslim community. And thereI was; thinking the man is an infidel who has insulted our prophet and shouldbe punished by stoning to death (followed by chopping of the hand that wrotethe blasphemous novel). You have opened my eyes, sir! I can’t thank you enough!I shall immediately send a telegram of apology to Mr. Rushdie after which Ishall start organizing a welcome party for him that will include my four wives and twelve children.’ Not very likely.

I have tosadly conclude that Dalrymple no more understand the minds of religious zealotsthan I understand the technicality of the surgery that created Eve from Adam’sribs.

Anyway,Rushdie, to begin with, was pretty gung ho about it. He declared that he wasgoing to attend the festival; he wasn’t banned from travelling to India; andtravel to India he would. And the cleric of the Islamic seminary could put itin his hookah and smoke it.

Rushdie’sintrepid announcement had a number of consequences.

Firstly the Muslim clericupped his ante, and he was joined in his condemnation of Rushdie by otherclerics (who probably wouldn't be able to pick out literature from an identity parade).

Secondly, a number of politicians (mostly local) from the two major politicalparties in India—the Congress and the right-of-the-centre BJP— opened theirgobs and came out in support of the Muslim cleric. They were not as loud (andridiculous) as the cleric, but opined that it was ‘inappropriate’ for Rushdieto come to the festival in the circumstances.

What arethe circumstances?

If youthought the circumstances are related to the ‘hurt Muslim sentiments’, youcould not be further from truth.

Thecircumstances, reported in The Guardianand The Telegraph are that severalstates in the Indian federation are poised for key provincial elections; and inseveral constituencies, Muslims form significant minorities and can influencethe outcome of the election if they choose to vote en mass for one or the otherparty. That is the reasons the politicians thought it was ‘inappropriate’ ofRushdie to visit India; because neither Congress nor BJP can afford to pissthem off. What the politicians meant was that it was inconsiderateof Rushdie to make matters awkward for them.

In the pastfew years (again, according to reports in the Western newspapers) Rushdie, whois of Indian descent, has visited the country of his birth on many occasions.He has even visited Jaipur, the city where the literary festival was beingheld. Nobody cared then. We didn’t hear the Muslim cleric howling in protestthen, nor did the Indian politicians weighed in with their ill-advised remarks.

There is,therefore, prima facie case to consider that the reason the Muslim cleric was confidenthis voice would be heard was because the elections are round the corner. That is democracy Indianstyle, I guess.

Thepoliticians were no doubt further inconvenienced by Rushdie’s refusal to budge.India being an open, democratic etcetera etcetera country, they could notprevent Rushdie from travelling to India, and appearing at the festival if heso wished.

So thepolice stepped in. Rushdie was informed—either directly or indirectly—by theintelligence agencies that there was a threat to his life if he appeared at thefestival; the agencies had obtained information that paid assassins from theMumbai Muslim underworld would be boarding trains for Jaipur to kill him, if he turned up at the festival.

In a statement read out on Rushdie’s behalf, he announced that while he had somedoubts as to the accuracy of the intelligence, he had decided to withdraw fromthe festival, as he thought it would be irresponsible of him to come to thefestival in these circumstances.

Circumstances. They had changed. Again. But had they? Really? The rumoursstarted floating in the festival venue that this was false intelligence; thatthe Mumbai underworld Dons had more worthwhile hings to do (smuggle in gold, diamonds,Nepali prostitutes) than send assassins to kill an author who managed tosurvive Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa.

SalmanRushdie immediately smelt a rat; not just rat—he also smelt a chipmunk, asquirrel, a hamster, a jerboa and a whole raft of rodents. He figured out that there was no plot tokill him. It was an attempt, no doubt engineered by the cynical Indianpoliticians at whose beck and call the Indian police apparently are, to keephim away from the festival and avoid pissing of Muslims voters.

It was nowRushdie’s turn to feel pissed off. Julius Caesar probably felt less betrayedwhen Brutus plunged the kitchen-knife between his shoulder blades.

Rushdie announced on twitter, from America (this great figure from the Indian Muslimcommunity whom the British taxpayers spent millions to protect after Khomeini’sfatwa, embraced American nationality afew years ago, citing that Britain was boring; he was right, but truth still hurts):

‘I have investigated and believe that I wasindeed lied to. I am outraged and very angry.’

(I do notknow what ‘investigation’ Rushdie carried out into the alleged Mumbaiunderworld plot to assassinate him, but he is a clever man. I am sure that hequickly figured out that the assassins, if they valued their own lives, wouldnot have dared to travel on the Indian trains, as they would have been suffocated (orcrushed) to death themselves before the train reached Jaipur. Rushdie must die,but not if they end up dying too.)

Thefire-breathing Muslim clerics were not embarrassed that their country faced severe criticism in The Guardian and The Telegraph over the whole affair. They did notbeat about the bush. They did not hide behind namby-pamby euphemisms we Britsare so good at. As one cleric told one of the Indian television channels, thematter was simple: Rushdie had written a book insulting Islam. (No, he had notread it; he would not pollute his eyes by reading the infidel’s book; also hecouldn’t read English). The man had shown or expressed no remorse for hisheinous crime. And the Muslims were not going to forgive him. He was happy thatRushdie was not coming to the festival. Allah be praised!

There werea couple of final twists to the story. The British novelist (of Indian descent)Hari Kunzru and another Indian novelist decided to read aloud excerpts from TheSatanic Verses in the festival (presumably to show solidarity toRushdie). Kunzru is a good writer (his debut novel, The Impressionist, wasvery impressive, as was My Revolutions), but he really mustdesist from such stunts. In any case both the novelists were prevented fromreading aloud from the novel by the organizers, which peeved Salman further andhe demanded explanation. (The explanation was: The Satanic Versesremains banned in India and reading from the novel probably constitutes a crimein that country.) I think the organizers did Kunzru a favour. Spending a niceweekend in the air-conditioned comforts of the hotel in which the festival washeld is one thing, but I don’t think Kunzru would have found the hospitality of Indian jailsquite up to the same standards.

Theorganizers then arranged a video-link conference at the venue with Rushdie.That too had to be cancelled at the last minute. Once again, the Indian policewere very canny. They knew that they could not stop the organizers from holding thevideo conference. So they prevailed upon the owner of the hotel to withdrawpermission to the conference (telling him that there might be violence in thehotel and thousands might riot on the streets) which left William Dalrymplefeeling ‘personally disgraced’.

What actuallyhappened was about 50 youths (presumably Muslim) entered the venue and startedintimidating people. The organizers could not explain how the men managed tobreach the security code. The police said they let the men in because they hadthe requisite delegate passes. Make of that what you will.

The policechief of Jaipur was remarkably unabashed about it. ‘In view of the simmering resentmentin the city [against Rushdie], I feared there would be problems in the festivaland riots outside, so I advised the owner to cancel the video broadcast,’ he said.

What does allthis mean for the world’s largest democracy? On the face of it, it is spectacularlycringeworthy. It is not an edifying spectacle when cynical politicians witheyes on the votes bow down to religious extremism. Rushdie wasted no time incastigating Indian politicians and Muslim religious leaders. Said Rushdie:

‘Currently the people whoclaim to be speaking for India's Muslims are either not the true leaders, orthey are certainly extremely bad leaders. And the fact that the politicalsystem plays with those leaders, wants to placate them, and curry favour with them,that of course is the fault of the political system.’

Rushdieprobably has a point. This is no doubt sociological experts would call as theparadox of modern India. On the one hand the country is poised to become one ofthe economic giants in the coming decades, with a proportion of its citizens—certainlythe educated and the well off classes—having the same sensibilities and valuesof Western civilizations; on the other hand are religious leaders (and, bythe looks of it, some politicians) who are living in medieval times.

That saidRushdie is a tad harsh on the country of his birth. Rushdie might have beenborn and lived in India when he was young, but it was not India but Britainthat intellectually nourished him. In his thinking Rushdie is a Westerner, and(perhaps understandably) takes for granted certain values like freedom ofspeech in a supposedly open, democratic and secular country. The thing is (Iknow, I know; it is a cliché) India is at once an ancient civilization and a very youngcountry. India as we know it today has existed for only sixty years, after theBritish left. What is happening is India trying to squeeze in sixtyyears what took centuries in Europe. Nobody promised the ride wouldn’t bebumpy.

Ultimately,I believe, the middle classes—the intellectual guardians of any culture—will determinewhich way India will go. There are almost 400 millions of them, and growing.Which suggests there is hope.

Asfor Rushdie, I think he should offer unhesitating apology to the Muslim world.He has to accept that there are parts of the world where folk are not as laidback about religion as some of us are in Britain. Where—even in democraciessuch as India— the Western concept of freedom to say offensive things is notreadily appreciated. He might not have intended to cause offence, but causeoffence he did. Why not accept with humility that you might have inadvertently offendeda culture, and apologize with good grace?

Salman Rushdie is a great writer, who has written many excellent novels. It would be a shame if he is forever linked with the controversy surrounding one of the novels (which is also an excellent novel).

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses and Hurt Muslim Sentiments

2012-01-17T09:51:00.000-08:00

The Vice Chancellor of the Darul Uloomseminary in Deoband is annoyed. He (I am assuming the vice chancellor is a man)is cheesed off. He is about as happy as Gordon Brown was on the May 2010election day.

Why is the vice chancellor of the DarulUloom Seminary in Deoband peeved? What is making him more sore than bleedinghaemorrhoids? What has caused him to be as comradely as a starving grizzly bearthat can’t get to the bee-hive at the top of the branch?

I can clarify.

The vice chancellor of the Darul Uloomseminary is in a towering rage (and we are talking at least forty stories here)because the infidel is coming to town.

I think more clarification is in order atthis stage.

The first question requiring an answer is:where in Allah’s name is Darul Uloom seminary? That is easy. The answer, givenin the first line of this post, is: Deoband.

The next question: where in the name ofMohammad is Deoband? I can answer this, too. Deoband is a town (I am assumingit is a town seeing as it has a seminary which boasts of a vice chancellor,although calling a cleric in a seminary a vice-chancellor is a bit like achiropractor calling himself a doctor) in India.

Where in India, I hear you asking, isDeoband? There you have got me. I don’t have a f**king clue. But wherever itis, the infidel would be well advised to steer clear of it. Because he is notwelcome there.

The infidel in question is Salman Rushdie,the Booker Prize winning author of Midnight’s Children, who, in 1988,wrote a novel entitled The Satanic Verses, which incurredthe wrath of the then supreme leader of the Islamic republic of Iran, the AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini. Khomeini, in his infinite wisdom, decreed that Rushdie hadinsulted the prophet and any punishment short of execution was too kind. AndKhomeini was not in a mood to show mercy to the insulter of the prophet (and byextension Islam). He took out a fatwaagainst Rushdie which gave permission for the infidel to be killed wherever he(the infidel) was.

The densely written The Satanic Verses, whichI doubt would otherwise have been heard of, let alone read, in the Muslimworld, achieved instant notoriety following Khomeini’s fatwa. Rushdie went into hiding and had to stay hidden for severalyears (the British taxpayers’ money was well spent in protecting him).

The Satanic Verses wasbanned in many countries, most of them Islamic.

India was one of the first countries to banTheSatanic Verses. The book is still officially banned in India, although,according to an Indian friend of mine, for a while after Khomeini’s fatwa the novel was one book that wassmuggled the most into the country (until the Indians realised that it wasunreadable).

(As an aside, I read somewhere that TheSatanic Verses has sold more copies than Midnight’s Children. Itis Rushdie’s most commercially successful novel to-date, all thanks toKhomeini’s fatwa, although I doubtthat that was Khomeini’s intention when he took out the fatwa.)

Salman Rushdie is of Indian descent (he wasborn and brought up in Mumbai, India), and he was said to be deeply hurt thatthe country of his origin banned the book even before it was banned in some ofthe Islamic countries.

India, of course, is not an Islamiccountry. It is a secular, democratic country. However, it has a sizeable Muslimpopulation. Muslims form almost 14% of India’s population (more than 100millions). One guesses that the Indian authorities were not overtly keen topiss off the already pissed off Muslim population by allowing the novel tobecome freely available.

In due course Rushdie came out of hiding. Iam not exactly sure, but I think after Khomeini’s death (I hope he is enjoyingthe delights of the paradise after leading a life of piety) the Iranian governmentfound some sort of face-saving formula, managing, in the process, the kind ofintellectual contortions that would have British politicians nodding withapproval; and essentially said that they were taking back Khomeini’s fatwa (and were happy to wait, instead,for the infidel to be struck by the full wrath of Allah).

India might have banned TheSatanic Verses, but it has not banned Rushdie from travelling to India.

Rushdie is invited to attend a literaryfestival that will be held in Jaipur, Rajasthan later this month. It is this invitation that has raised thehackles of the vice-chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary.

Rushdie is not the only prominent writer(in the Western hemisphere) who will be in attendance. Other prominent authorsattending this literary festival include the Pulitzer Award winning Americannovelist, Annie Proloux; the 1991 Booker Winner Ben Okri (we shall ignore forthe moment that Okri has written little of consequence since his Booker wintwenty years ago); the British playwright David Hare; and Richard Dawkins. Thelast name is interesting. I have not read Richard Dawkins (he bores me with hisconstant anti-God, anti-religions hectoring), but I should hazard a guess thatDawkin’s views about all religions, God, and figures—historical and currentthat claimed to have had a special relationship with or an exclusive channel ofcommunication with the Supreme being—are likely to be even more sceptical thanthose expressed in one section of The Satanic Verses.

(I should briefly clarify my position onGod and religion, here. Having given the matter considerable thought over theyears, I have decided to hedge my bets and have settled on a position of agnosticism.It is like this: if you spend all your life believing that God exists, thatthere is afterlife, and that you would be answerable for your deeds in thislife after your death; and if God does not exist, if there is no afterlife,what have you got to lose? You die, and there is nothing after that. On theother hand, if you spend all your life bad-mouthing God, and if he does exist,then, upon your demise, you are going to meet a Supreme Being that is more f**kedoff than the vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, India.)

So, this is the situation. There is aliterary festival in India, to which Salman Rushdie is invited. The vicechancellor of a Muslim seminary in India is upset about it. He does not thinkthat the infidel who has insulted the great religion and its founder should beinvited in any official capacity to India.

I have no reason to believe that the vicechancellor is an unwise man. I do not know whether he has actually read TheSatanic Verses. If he has never left India, he would not—at any rate,should not—have read the offending novel, which is banned in that country. (Maybe he travelled to the UK with the specific aim of reading the novel anddeciding for himself whether Rushdie offended the Muslim sentiments; or perhapshe was content to put his faith in the sound judgment of the late Ayatollah ofIran and considered The Satanic Verses blasphemous even if he has not read the novelhimself. It does not matter. You have a right to feel offended about or haveview against something you have no personal experience of. I am totally againstgreenhouse gases; I think it is bad news for the planet. I also believe thatAmerica, China, and India, in that order, are currently the worst offenders;and the politicians—power-makers in case of China—in their short-sightednessare making our planet a more dangerous place. Believe me, I hold very strongview on the matter; I have seriously considered going on marches (beforerejecting it in favour of shouting abuses at the TV screen at the Ten o’clock BBCnews). I could not explain to you, though, what exactly greenhouse gases areand in what way they are endangering the planet. But that does not stop me fromhaving very strong views on the subject.) The point is: people can have verystrong views on matters they know little about, or, in some cases, are evenmisinformed about. That is life. Therefore, while it is possible that a vast majority of the tensof millions in the Islamic world who feel deeply offended by the allegedanti-Islamic views of Rushdie in The Satanic Verses has not actually read the novel, that does notmake the sentiments ersatz in my view.I would rather they read The Satanic Verses and decide forthemselves whether or not Rushdie offended Islam. (May be some of them did andfeel, after reading the novel thatRushdie insulted their religion. I have known a few educated Muslims over theyears and with some of them, whom I became friendly with, I tried to discussThe Rushdie issue. Not a single one of them admitted to have read TheSatanic Verses. None of them called Rushdie an infidel, either, Ishould point out; or wished him a horrible death. There was, if anything, a marked reluctance to discuss this on their part,which I suspected was because they did hold strong views on the matter. Butthat is my guess.) I could also go on the Net and find out more about it sothat I can have an informed opinion on the matter; but I can’t be bothered.

So what is the vice chancellor of the DarulUloom seminary in Deoband saying? According to the article in The DailyTelegraph, the vice chancellor, who goes by the impressive name ofMaulana Abul Qasim Nomeni, is calling upon

‘the Muslim organizations of the country [India]to mount pressure on the centre to withdraw the visa and prevent him [Rushdie] visitingIndia where [tens of millions] community members still feel hurt owing to theanti-Islamic remarks in his writings The Muslims cannot pardon him at anycost.’

Abul QasimNomeni, it would be fair to say, is not feeling particularly benevolent towardsRushdie, which, one might say, is only to be expected of a man whose namerhymes with Khomeini. He is (or thinks he is) speaking on behalf of tens ofmillions of community members (Muslims), who, he assures us, are still hurtover the anti-Islamic remarks in Rushdie’s writings. (Interesting that Maulanadoes not actually mention The Satanic Verses; instead he usesthe generic term ‘writings’. Does this mean that Rushdie has made remarks thatcan be construed as anti-Islamic in his other writings?—I have read half adozen Rushdie novels and The Satanic Verses is the only onewhich can be viewed as anti-Islamic. Or is it the case that the pious Maulanacan’t bring himself to even utter the name of the infidel’s novel?)

The headlineunder which The Daily Telegraph chose to publish the article is also interesting.The headline is:

Sir Salman Rushdie facingthreat of Muslim reprisals over Jaipur Literature Festival appearance’.

Maybe I ammissing something, or The Daily Telegraph has chosen tokeep hidden a vital piece of information from its readers.

What Abul QasimNomeni is, according to the Telegraph’s own article, asking is:(a) the writer’s centre withdraw invitation to Rushdie, and / or (b) withdrawthe visa to Rushdie so that he cannot travel to India. (The second calling ispresumably to Indian authorities; I wouldn’t have thought that the writer’scentre that has organized the festival would have any say in the matter.)

That hardly qualifiesas a threat of Muslim reprisal. The vice chancellor is not exhorting the‘community members’ to tie explosive to their genitals and blow themselves upin the festival. He is encouraging the community members to put pressure on theIndian government to withdraw Rushdie’s visa. One might disagree with the vicechancellor; one might feel that his views are not adequately informed; but onecan hardly take an issue with his methods.

In recent years,the UK has banned a number of organizations, books and pamphlets, which thegovernment (read security agencies) feels is inimical to the fabric of thesociety; the government has also banned individuals from entering the country.The vice chancellor Nomeni wants a ban on Rushdie visiting his country. He isentitled to his views, however misguided we think they are, and, in a freecountry, he has every right to voice them. India is a country with free speech;it is not country with free visiting rights.

The worry, ofcourse, is that while the learned vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom universitymight not be espousing violent methods to get the message across, his clarioncall might just be the kind of encouragement some radical ‘community members’—who have come to the conclusion that the world does not change through somebodyasking nicely and whose chief mode of communication, therefore, is hand-madebombs—do not need.

Let’s go back toIndia’s banning of The Satanic Verses. I don’t know why India banned the book, butI can guess. The Indian politicians probably concluded that (a) the Muslimsentiments were indeed hurt by the novel, and (b) publishing of the book mightlead to law and order problems. And they decided that the best way to deal withthe situation and prevent it from escalating further was to ban the book.

The Satanic Verses was not the first, and won’t be the last,book to be banned. The list of novels banned in the UK and America in thetwentieth century, because they fell foul, in some way or the other, of thepowers that be, is longer than a lemur’s tail.

That does notmake the banning of The Satanic Verses right, mind, in my view; however, as thecliché goes, time is the best leveler, and decisions which either make perfectcontextual sense or serve some or the other expediency (political, culturaletcetera), will look, with the passage of time, cynical, dishonest and wrong.

Is Abul QasimNomeni, the vice chancellor of Darul Uloom seminary, a fundamentalist Muslim?He might be, or he might not be. All I can say is Islam is not the onlyreligion which generates fundamentalists. Christianity has its own brand ofreligious headcases. Like the organization in Russia which wants the BhagvadGeeta (sacred book of Hindus) to be banned in Russia because it isanti-Christian, apparently. Or the American nutter who was going to burn theKoran. There is no dearth of Christian Evangelists who are bat-shit mental andgo into proselytizing over-drive, spreading the true message of Christmas (andgenerally being a pain in the neck) every December. True, in recent years, theChristian fundamentalists have not been involved in acts of spectacularviolence; but that might be because Christian lands have not been invaded byMuslim armies.

However, let’sget back to the Rushdie affair. In recent years, Rushdie is the second authorthat I know of who has invited disapprobation for his alleged anti-Islamicviews. In 2010, V.S. Naipaul withdrew from giving the inaugural speech for theEuropean Writers’ Parliament, in Turkey, after a slew of Turkish writers andjournalists, criticized the decision to invite Naipaul, who, according to them,was anti-Islamic. (Commented on this blog.)

Rushdie—blesshim!—has so far shown no inclination to withdraw. Instead he has given out astatement (bold or belligerent, take your pick) to the effect that he fullyintends to attend the festival, and because he is of Indian origin he does not evenneed a visa to visit India.

Rushdie, in thewords of William Darlymple, the organizer of the Jaipur Literary Festival, hasmade a major ‘contribution to multiculturalism, pluralism and co-existence.’ Heis (Dalrymple, again) ‘one of the greatest artists India has created’. He isalso (Dalrymple hasn’t finished yet) ‘one of the greatest figures to come outof Indian Muslim community.’

This is highpraise indeed. I do not know about Rushdie’s contribution to all the ismsDalrymple is talking about; neither do I possess knowledge of great Muslimfigures that have come out of the Indian Muslim community (I am happy to takeDalrymple’s word for it). What I do know (having read six of his novels) isRushdie is a superb writer. Three cheers for Rushdie.

Top Gear India Special-: Clarkson Does it Again

2012-01-13T14:45:00.000-08:00

AsI have written in the past on this blog, I am not a car enthusiast and I am notin the habit of watching, regularly at any rate, car-related programmes;certainly not when they are fronted by not very good looking middle aged men.(Come to think of it, I wouldn’t watch them even when they are presented by goodlooking blokes.)

ThereforeI did not watch the Top Gear—India Special that was aired on the BBC, twice, during the Christmasperiod.

Top Gear,of course, is a hugely popular (in the UK) programme on cars,presented by three middle-aged men: one—tall with a huge belly, big teeth, andhair that look from a distance like islands of grey broccoli (Jeremy Clarkson); another—of average height,also parading a beer belly and hair that look as if he blow dries them with thepropeller of a Jet-plane, which conspire to have the net effect of making him lookas though he woke up in a ditch (James May); and a third one, who is tiny butis not fat—in fact he is nothing; he is like a sack half-filled with sticks—andhas limp hair that look as if they resist any attempts at styling (Hammond; Ican’t remember his first name).

Jeremy Clarkson (This is what happens when you live on a diet of potato fat and lager)

James May (Where is my absinthe?)

Hammond (Am I a t**t?)

However,I should hazard a guess that the viewership of this vastly popular programme onthe BBC (mostly comprising men, I should guess) is not attracted to it because of the stunninggood looks of these three men. They watch it because—difficult as it is for meto believe it—they are utterly fascinated by cars. I don’t get it. I am constitutionallyunable to appreciate comments—however witty they are—on the hydraulic functionsof the engines or the horsepower (or whatever it is called); they don’tinterest me..

Thequasi-technical jibber-jabber on these programmes is, as far as I am concerned,a language spoken on Jupiter, a planet I have no intention of visiting. Thus whenClarkson or May or Hammond circles round a car in the studio (with a simpering crowdof mostly men and a few women (with heads like racing mullets) in thebackground—the Room Intelligent Quotient, you would imagine, being slightlyabove that of farmyard animals), mouthing things like ‘2.0-litre, 16 valvesturbocharged engine’ with the air that they are revealing the secret of theelixir of life, I do not share their awe. Or, when Clarkson goes all dewy eyedabout some car, say, Lancia, that went out of production in the last century (probably because it was crapand there was no demand for it), or describes some long-since extinctHalf-Estate-Half-Sport-Coupe as drop dead gorgeous, I cannot share his sentimental nostalgia. Or, when hedescribes wrathfully some car as the most unreliable pile of over-rated rubbishon wheels, the only emotion I experience is amazement that anyone can froth atmouth about a car he is getting to test-drive for free; it is not as if he hasspent his undeservedly earned money on it. And with the best will in the worldI can’t get myself to feel ecstatic about pointless information such as 0 to 60miles in 5 seconds or whatever. What is the use of this information? It is notas if you would be able to put this function to use in your day-to-day life. Whywould you want to go from 0 to 60 in less than five (or three) seconds anyway?It’s a bit like Prince Andrew’s sex appeal: what is the point?

Mostof the cars reviewed on the programme are unaffordable, anyway; I bet more than90% of people who are glued to the box when the programme is aired, can’tafford to buy them.

WatchingTopGear type programmes is, for me, about as exciting as watching yournails grow. Tiresome does not even begin to describe it.

Mindyou, I have nothing against blokes who harbour unhealthy interests in cars; you never know what will move one’s rocks. Over the years I have knownpeople with peculiar habits. At one of my workplaces was a guy who wasborderline obsessed with squid. Another was into German board games. A girl Iused to go out with was interested in French literature.

IndeedI can empathize with the strong affection people come to invest in things—becauseI have unhealthy interests of my own—books—which may seem peculiar to others—,even though I can’t understand why the objects of their affection come to yieldthe influence they do on the besotted: rhinestone jewellery or absinthe; orcars.

ButI digress. Back to Top Gear—India Special. I did not watch this special editionaired over Christmas—I am interested in India (it is a fascinating country) butnot interested in cars—which have raised the hackles of Indians. Or, IndianHigh commission in England, to be specific.

TheIndian High Commission in London has sent a formal letter of complaint to theBBC. On the face of it, that is one more country Clarkson and his co-presentershave managed to offend (Mexico and Albania being other).

Itis interesting, however, that after the programme was aired the BBC receivedonly 23 complaints. This suggests that the Indian Diaspora in Britain was (a)not offended; or (b) was offended but did not complain to the BBC; or (c) (Ihope to God this is true—) did not watch the programme.

Soone cannot say that the complaint about Clarkson’s antics on TopGear has arisen from the ‘over-sensitive’ minorities in this country,which, as any Daily Mail reader will tell you, are pampered.

Thecomplaint has come from the official representative of a country, which allowedthe BBC to film this programme inthat country.

Asper the letter published in the Daily Telegraph, when the producerof TopGear wrote to the Indian High-Commission, requesting for permission toenter and film in India, the High Commission was given assurance that theprogramme would be a ‘light-hearted road trip’ that would focus on the ‘idiosyncrasiesof the cars’ the three presenters would drive, as well as on ‘the country andscenery’ along the way. The programme was going to involve ‘spontaneousinteraction between the presenters and their environment and people, in anincidental manner’. The key-ingredients were going to be ‘local charm andcolour within these locations’ and illustration of the local car culture’.

Theformal letter of complaint from the Indian High Commission accuses that theprogramme was ‘replete with cheap jibes, tasteless humour, and lacked culturalsensitivity.’ The letter goes on to accuse that the BBC was ‘clearly in breachof the agreement’ it ‘had entered into, completely negating’ the HighCommission’s ‘proactive facilitation.’

Whatthe Indians (or the Indian High Commission, to be specific) seem to be sayingis—there is no kinder way of putting this—the BBC told them lies to get permissionto film in their country; accepted all the help that was offered; and then madea programme that was contrary to the spirit of the agreement it had enteredinto.

Iwatched the programme on the BBC i-player that has so offended the sentimentsof the Indian High Commission and (one Raj Dhutta, of Manchester IndianAssociation, who described the programme as tasteless).

Itis a long programme: 1 hour and 30 minutes. I managed to watch the first 50minutes, at which point of time the computer stopped broadcasting, giving themessage, instead, that the band-width was not enough. Which was just as well,as I was contemplating in my mind what would be more painful: slashing mywrists or watching the programme.

Iam a bit disappointed with the tone of complaint of the letter sent by theIndian High Commission. I would have understood if they were offended (I think the letter uses a milder word: 'disappointed') that theTopGear presenters managed to make a programme about such a colourful andvibrant country as theirs that was so utterly boring.

Ialso agree with Raj Dhutta (of Indian Association in Manchester) that theprogramme was remarkably crass and tasteless. It was more than tasteless. Itwas sad.

Thetrouble with the Top Gear, as far as I am concerned, in addition to being abouta boring topic such as cars, is: it is presented by three boring old farts(with combined age in three figures) who insist on behaving and speaking as ifthey were hormonal teenagers.

Atone stage in the programme the three presenters put up a banner on a train whichsaid ‘Eat British Muffins’. Then when the train carriages are decoupled, thebanner tears and the camera focuses on ‘Eat British Muff’. Honestly. I couldjust about have tolerated this level of humour if the presenters were younger(and fitter). But when it comes from the likes of Clarkson (as handsome as a prizeox), May (who looks like a tramp) and a midget (will be blown out of the room if you sneezed in his face), it is just pathetic. As you watch the three ofthem howling like a simultaneously sexed up and seriously injured dog, when the carriages move, the paunches of two of them wobbling unattractively, all that is missing—you feel—is: shaved heads, bicepsswollen by anabolic steroids, flags of St George tattooed on one arm and of naked women on the other—and lo and behold! You arelooking at perfect English gentlemen.

Sincemy computer gave up showing the programme at the fiftieth minute, I was sparedthe spectacle of Clarkson taking off his trousers in front of Indiandignitaries (the photograph in one of the tabloids shows that there was a womanpresent as well) and showing them how to use a trouser press. He apparentlyjoked that he used it to make nan bread. I cannot believe that this was a ‘spontaneous’interaction the producer had assured the Indian High Commission in London theywould be filming. It was clearly a staged event. Which suggests to me twothings: (1) the Indians were probably given an indication what Clarkson wasgoing to do. (2) The woman in the crowd was very brave. I mean Clarkson, even whenfully clothed, is not a sight for sore eyes (or sensitive stomachs). His teethare enough to scare toddlers, and when he laughs his face comes to hold an uncannyresemblance to a bullfrog gulping in pain. He has a big face, which, still, isnot big enough to handle his nose adequately. Having to look at his ugly mug, Iwould have thought, is punishment enough. Why would you want to be there whenthis man, who essentially is a mule combined with an ass combined with a bear,takes off his trousers, parading his flabby, pasty-white thighs? The woman must have been a glutton for punishment.

Therewas another scene in the programme when the three presenters were seen, with another fat (and ugly) bloke (presumably the producer of the programme), on a train from Mumbai to Jaipur, singing songs to the accompaniment of a drumand cello (which, no doubt, materialised ‘spontaneously’ in the carriage),generally creating a ruckus and disturbing other passengers, who seemed totolerate the antics with bemused tolerance.

Whenwill these idiots realise that when they behave in this fashion they are notbeing quaint; they are not being eccentric; they are just pain in the bum.

Whenthe presenters were not juvenile, crass, obnoxious (and generally insufferable),they were behaving like toffee-nosed wankers.

Thelevel of humour in the programme made the Carry On films—which, let me say thisclearly, are third rate—appear like acme of intellectual sophistication. (As anaside, I have always struggled to fathom why the Carry On films are considered bysome to be some sort of national treasure. They are not funny in the least;they are just smutty; the actors couldn’t act; utterly dreadful).

Allof the above are of course my subjective views. It is possible that there are peopleout there who found the Top Gear—India Special fascinating, funny, and watchable, just in the same way there are thosewho find the WWF fighting genuine and thrilling.

Thereis an American friend of mine who tells me that he is tired of listening to English colleagues in his company telling him all the time that the Americans do notget English humour. ‘I can’t seem to get across to these morons,’ he tells me, ‘thatI don’t find their toilet humour funny, which is different from not getting it.’

Thereis a thin line between comic use of stereotyping, as the BBC disingenuouslytried to put to the Mexicans after the midget Hammond said offensive things about their culture, and plain boorishness. Bullshit—even whensaid in the posh BBC accent—won’t alwaysbaffle the brain.

Ican see why the Indian High Commission was peeved with the BBC and Top Gear. The thing is: when we go to other countries and cultures;enjoy and take advantage of the hospitalities offered by these cultures in goodfaith; and make programmes full of crude and low level humour, we run the riskof portraying an image of our culturethat does not make a pretty viewing. However, I do not expect that the likes ofthe producers of Top Gear, who are so up their own arses that they canpractically drink their own bile, to appreciate this.

Book of the Month: The Masque of Africa (V.S. Naipaul)

2012-01-04T00:16:00.000-08:00

In thesecond section of his most recent, quite possibly his last, non-fiction book, Masqueof Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, V.S. Naipaul recounts anincident. He is in Nigeria and, in the company of his local guide, a Muslimnamed Adesina, he is visiting a babalawo—a soothsayer. On a little table in front of the babalawo are his magic things (Naipaul’s words), amongst which is a‘sensationally dirty’ school exercise book. After the fee of the consultationis settled—the soothsayer initially demands a thousand dollars, but Adesina,‘used to this kind of outrage’ remains calm and beats him down in the end tosomething much smaller—Naipaul has to ask the babalawo a question. Naipaul asks, ‘Will my daughter get married?’(Naipaul does not have any children of his own, but his second wife has agrown-up daughter from her first marriage). The babalawo is thrown by this question. He says, ‘I thought only blackpeople have such problems.’ The babalawo isnevertheless willing to give an opinion. He consults his exercise book,performs some rituals using cowry shells and two small gourds tied with a pieceof string. Finally he is ready to tell Naipaul the future: ‘The girl,’ declaresthe babalawo portentously, ‘is notgoing to get married. You have many enemies. To break their spells we will haveto do many rituals. They will cost money, but the girl will get married.’Everyone in the room is quite excited. Adesina and his brother (both of whom,despite being Muslims, believe in and have maintained links with thetraditional religion), Naipaul remarks, ‘the babalawo had them all in the palm of his hand.’ Then Naipaul says,‘But what he [babalawo] has told meis good. I don’t want the girl to be married.’ Naipaul concludes the incidentwith the wry comment: ‘I believe only the reverence of Adesina and others savedthe day.’

The aboveis a rare moment of light relief in an otherwise doleful book.

V.S.Naipaul, the recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a man who hasreinvented himself in a literary career spanning more than five decades duringwhich he has produced approximately thirty works of fiction andnon-fiction. He started off with novels.His early novels were brilliant works of satirical comedies with the Caribbeanislands (where he was born and bred) as the backdrop. The two works from thisperiod which stand out, for me, are Miguel Street and TheHouse for Mister Biswas. Naipaul’s later fictional work became moresombre, assumed, for want of better phrase, more gravitas, and, as years wentby, the humour—so fresh and evident in his early novels—vanished completely.You get a flavour of things to come in his 1967 novel Mimic Men, which, inparts, still has comic moments. The grave, almost mythical, tone of his fictionis really set from A Flag on the Island (which won the 1971 Booker Prize) onwards.The three novels from this period which I think are outstanding are (inchronological order): A Bend in the River, AnEnigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. ABend in the River is perhaps my most favourite Naipaul novel, but A Wayin the World is extraordinary, too. It is not a conventional novel atall; rather it is a complex interweaving of personal memories, stories ofpossibly real life characters, and historical metafiction: it is, quite simply,awesome.

Naipaul didnot build his reputation solely on fiction, though. Had Naipaul restrictedhimself only to writing fiction, he would still have earned his place in theannals of world literature. I do not know what the critics would have made ofhis later fiction, but certainly his early fiction would have beenacknowledged—perhaps still is—as fiction which opened gates for talentedCommonwealth Writers (Salman Russhdie, Rohinton Mistry, Caryl Philipsetcetera).

However,Naipaul did not write only fiction. From 1960s onwards, he began to travel. Hetravelled to different corners of the European Empires. The fruits of histravels were a kind of reportage books with a difference. Naipaul has written a trilogy of books onIndia, the country of his ancestors; on South Americas; the Caribbean; and twobooks of astonishing prescience from his travels in the Islamic countries. Inthese books Naipaul evolved a style that was adopted by other writers, mostnotably Paul Theroux and Shiva Naipaul (Naipaul’s younger brother who died of aheart attack when he was only forty, and is a largely forgotten name thesedays). These travel writings—they are not typical travelogues, as alreadymentioned—established Naipaul’s reputation as a contrarian writer, who was notafraid to express views that were considered as ‘politically incorrect’. (Addto this Naipaul’s recent penchant for making seemingly outrageous statements inhis interviews, which generate a lot of ill-feeling towards him—although heseems not to care, revel, even, in this persona (should we call it amasque?)—and you get an idea why Sir Vidia has become a controversial characterin British literary scene.) In these peregrinations Naipaul casts himself as an‘outsider’. He has no allegiance to anyone or anything except truth, or what hesees as truth. He is not wedded to any ideology or philosophy and tells it ashe sees it. As far as possible he lays out for the reader what he sees ordiscusses (with others) without any sensor (as it were); on the rare occasionswhen he passes a judgment (or comment) he appears acutely aware of thelimitations—prejudices if you may—of his vision. It is this, together with thequality of his writing, that has won Naipaul his fans (probably not many)amongst whom I include myself.

The Masque of Africa with its somewhat imprecisesubtitle—the Glimpses of African Beliefs—is Naipaul’s first work ofnon-fiction in over a decade. In it he returns to the continent he firstvisited 44 years ago and which provided a backdrop to some of his fiction.Starting with Uganda—where he spent several months as a writer in residence atthe Makerere University in Kampala (a version of which he used some years laterin ABend in the River—the country, not the university)—Naipaul visits fivemore African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa.

Naipaul ismainly interested in finding out about the traditional religions of Africa, theolder, animistic beliefs and practices that were prevalent in the continentbefore the two great religions of the world—Christianity and Islam—arrivedand asserted themselves—imposed, even,—onthe population. Naipaul wants to know, bearing in mind the theme of his travel,what has happened to the traditional religions of Africa.

The themeis not new. It has been examined—in particular the clash between the older andthe more modern (for want of better phrase) religions and the apparentlyunbridgeable differences between their doctrines and explanatory models—infiction before: the superb Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)and almost equally remarkable Purple Hibiscus (Chimamanda NgoziAdichie). What we get in The Masque of Africa isthe non-fiction version, or Naipaul’s version of it.

Naipaul famously saidonce, ‘An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction neverlies: it reveals the writer totally.’ By his own yardstick, TheMasque of Africa lends itself vulnerable to the charge of Naipauldistorting or not reporting faithfully— either because his memory has playedtricks with him or because what he has heard does not fit into hispre-conceived notion about Africa—what he hears in his meetings with theAfricans. Indeed in his review of the book William Boyd (a favourite writer of mine;he writes entertaining novels, but let’s face it—he is never going to writeanything that would make you pause and think and examine your conceptions)brazenly says that the ‘transcribed monologues’ seemed ‘bogus’ to him. That isan astonishing accusation to hurl at a writer renowned for his searing honesty.Boyd gives some bogus sounding (to me) explanations why he doubts the veracity ofNaipaul’s conversations with the Africans: it would appear that Boyd’s view of Naipaul’s travel writing is changedforever by what he calls the French Effect (referring to warts and all‘authorized’ biography of Naipaul by Patrick French, never mind that bothNaipaul and his second wife have since expressed bitterness and reservationsabout the biography). At the end of the day these are subjective impressionswhich cannot be explained away rationally. For what it is worth none of theconversations with the various people Naipaul meets in the course of histravels seemed inauthentic to me. However, it would be fair to say that some ofthe conversations make uncomfortable reading. Here is an extract of theconversation between Naipaul and a distinguished academic, a former dean of theUniversity of Gabon, a man of mixed ancestry (French father and African mother)but, who, Naipaul comments, ‘like many people of mixed ancestry, appeared to beembracing the African side of his inheritance.’ This man, a lawyer byprofession, who thinks of himself as a political scientist and teachespolitical anthropology at the University of Gabon, is also a passionatebeliever in the traditional religion of Gabon and has, as Naipaul puts it,‘come to a poetic understanding of the place of forest in the Gabonese mind.’The lawyer gives Naipaul examples of his encounters with the supernatural. WhenNaipaul asks him whether he can define the religion of forest more closely, hereplies, ‘in a precise, academic way’:

‘We cannot call it a religion. It is a set ofbeliefs. We don’t pray to God because in our understanding God is notaccessible to humans. It [he meant the idea of God] has many other problems andhas no time for humans.’

Does thissound ‘bogus’? How about the following? After describing to Naipaul the levelsof ‘organic world’, the lawyer explains the ‘initiation ceremony’:

‘You remain afraid. Initiation and ritual onlygive you a path through the forest. You are not protected against others, womenespecially. Women are very important in the society. They are the real power. Awoman may not exercise power, but she gives it to her son. We are a matrilinealsociety, and women give life. This country was not made for men. Women’s bodiesare stronger, and so they are witches. There are many ritual sacrifices wherethe eyes are removed and tongues torn out of living victims. Every day there isa ritual sacrifice. White skin is very prized here, and for that reason Icannot let my light-skinned children out in the evening.’

Naipaulthen asks the lawyer the importance of the tongue and the lawyer replies that‘they’ remove the tongue to get energy. When Naipaul asks him what he thinksabout it, the lawyer replies, ‘There is no name. It is too shocking.’ Then, forthe first time in this entire piece, Naipaul gives the reader a glimpse of whathe thinks, his judgment as it were:‘It was a relief to hear him say that. He had spoken of ‘energy’ in such apositive way I thought he might have been more accepting.’

The format of TheMasque of Africa is similar to Naipaul’s earlier travel writings, agenre that he created. He travels to countries; he visits places in thesecountries and observes; and he talks and listens. He meets people and asks themquestions. You get the impression by the very nature of these encounters thatthey are not random; that the people Naipaul meets are ‘recruited’ by his contactsin the country he is visiting because they are ‘interesting’. Almost everyoneNaipaul meets during his African travels and whose conversations he records forthe reader is a well educated African occupying a high position or holding downa white collar job, who has interesting things to say about Africa and its oldreligion.

And what does Naipaulfind when he speaks to these selected individuals? He discovers that underneaththe patina of Christianity and Islam, the old, traditional religion lives on.Some of these individuals are comfortable with it and in their minds have dualidentities without any cognitive dissonance, such as some of the NigeriansNaipaul meets, who consider themselves Catholic Christians belonging to theYoruba tribe and have no hesitation in performing traditional rites notapproved by ‘modern’ religions. Some others, like Nicole, the lady policebody-guard Naipaul is provided with in Gabon, have rejected the old religiontotally and become staunch Christians. In Gabon Naipaul, with Nicole, visits anisolated establishment in the village of Lope, deep in the forest, where thetribal chief has promised to show him the siren of the river—a white woman. Asit happens Naipaul does not avail himself of this offer as he is feeling too tired.This is what Naipaul says:

‘She [Nicole] was Christian, but she had the old Gaboneseanxiety about water, an inauspicious element. The talk about the white sirensat the bottom of the river wouldn’t have pleased her at all; and she had beenpraying and praying, against hope for much of the time, that the river tripwouldn’t take place. Now, miraculously, her prayers have been answered, givingher, I suppose, yet another proof of the power of the prayer.’

In Libreville, whereNaipaul is invited to witness an initiation ceremony—a performance, as Naipaulis aware, for the benefit for the visitors, arranged by a Frenchman who hasmarried a Gabonese woman—Nicole accompanies Naipaul. But she refuses to go tothe ceremony. Naipaul comments:

‘She was a Christian and wanted no part ofthis spirit talk. The drumming and chanting might have been done only fortourists, but it agitated her. Working her lips but not speaking loudly, shewas saying ‘Hail Mary’ again and again, speaking her Christian charm againstwhatever charms were in play here, and unwittingly paying tribute to the powerof African spirits.’

Not all AfricansNaipaul meets are as won over as Nicole is by Christianity. In Uganda he meetsan educated middle class woman who is raised as a Christian. Naipaul describesher as ‘someone overtly Christian but with a love for her roots’. This womanequates the traditional African religion with the African culture. Says she:

‘Modernity wants us to sweep our cultureaway, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict betweenChristianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there was adrought, or it was prolonged, all the elders got together and made sacrifices,and it would rain while they were at it. My grandmother told me this. But themissionaries called it devil worship. Culture does not die—today it is calledwitchcraft. My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in aspecial way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over their grave, toprotect and shade them. Every year my grandmother went there to tend the shed,feed the grave, and sing and dance there. When she became a Pentecostal she hadto stop that, as it was not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was soafraid that the twins would come and kill her living children. I talk to myselfso as not to get confused. To me it is all about belief and what treats youwell. In traditional religion it was not about money. It was a communal spiritand people come together for common cause like the drought.’

And, Naipaulconcludes:

‘Gradually from the tragedies . . . andfrom conversations with good people, the visitor arrives at the unsettling ideaof a poor country, still vulnerable—in its people, living on their nerves, andeven its landscape, which might be despoiled—after forty years of civilconflict, still waiting for an upheaval which may solve nothing.’

Depressing? Yes.Far-fetched? I am not sure. Racist? Definitely not.

Although Naipaul doesnot directly say this, the impression you are left with—the impression Naipaulwants you to be left with—is that on the whole ‘outside’ religions such asChristianity, foisted upon the Africans by a bunch of fanaticalmissionaries—exemplified by ‘Doctor’ Schweitzer (who is briefly mentioned)—,who had no love or respect for the old African beliefs, were inimical to theAfrican culture. The Africans were told, as the Christianity sought to imposeits intellectual superiority, that their traditional beliefs and ideas aboutnature and divinity were mere superstitions, of low value. The Africans werecompelled, almost, to feel ashamed of their heritage which was dismissed asmere mumbo-jumbo (the book traces the origin of this word and links it to anancient African (Nigerian) custom). It was cultural imperialism of the worstkind, and its effect was calamitous. The closest Naipaul comes to voicing thisis to imply that if left to its own traditional beliefs Africa ‘might havearrived at its own more valuable synthesis of old and new’. It is a compellingargument, all the more so because Naipaul does not actually make it; he leavesit to the reader to figure it out.

For thebest part Naipaul refrains scrupulously from making any value judgments. Occasionally,though, the mask slips; and what is revealed is weary exasperation. Forexample, in Ivory Coast, the land of ivory, but ‘now without the elephants thatby their death provided the ivory of their tusks’, he describes two ‘cruel’elephant monuments: one of a female elephants with her calf (elephants, Naipaulinforms, is food in this part of Africa), and a tall, awkward obelisk composed(Naipaul says, ‘wickedly’) of elephant tusks alone. In the same section, towards the end, thereis a detailed description of how bats are caught and boiled before they areeaten in the Ivory Coast. These fruit bats or their fleas, the reader isinformed, are carriers of the deadly Ebola virus. ‘The victims bleed helplesslytill they die. No one knows for sure how the virus jumps from bat to man; but agood guess is that the virus is transmitted by the eating of the bat.’ Naipaulends the section with a prognostication that is almost Biblical:

‘So the darkening of Abidjan [capital of Ivory Coast] sky at dusk was not only part of the visualdrama of West Africa: it was like a plague waiting to fall on the men below.’

In thefirst country he visits, Uganda, Naipaul talks about a chimpanzee sanctuary seton one of the islands of Lake Victoria: forty two animals, he informs, whoseparents and animals had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are ‘greatrelishers of what they call as bush meat’ and—Naipaulian acerbity, this—‘givenguns and left to themselves would easily eat their way through the continent’swildlife.’

Naipaul issimilarly unsparing when it comes to looking at (and presenting to the reader)his own instincts and impulses; and they, too, at times, make uncomfortablereading. In Gabon, Naipaul comes to know about the Pigmies, ‘the smallpeople’—‘the first inhabitants of the forest’—, from the local Africans,although he never actually meets one. After listening at length to Claudine, one of his guides in Gabon, thisis how Naipaul records his feelings:

‘Even with Claudine’s knowledge of the pigmyways, and her love for them, it was hard to arrive at a human understanding ofthe pigmies, to see them as individuals. Perhaps they weren’t.’

This neednot appear as chilling (or racist) as it did to some reviewers. What Naipaulseems to be saying here is that he found it very difficult to understand how itmight be to be a pigmy, so different (or alien) he found their ways from his.He is acknowledging a deficiency. In any case, not all the Gabonese Africansseem to have the love for the ‘first inhabitants of the forest’. Naipaul meetsa Gabonese tribal chief and traditional healer of the Fang tribe (appointed bythe Gabonese government). This man, who was baptized and confirmed, but decidedthat ‘the traditional religion was strong in him’, tells Naipaul how he wastrained in the religious rituals of the tribe. This is what he says:

‘My grandfather had gone south on an oldwalking road and he had captured two pigmies. He owned them. The pigmies havethe power and we keep them just like you keep pets. You can do anything youlike with your pet, but there is something in the pet that you don’t have. Wekept them and we pitied them. . .’

While themain theme of these travels, as suggested in the title, is to understand—or tryto understand—the traditional African beliefs, there are two parallel streamsthat run throughout the length of the book.

The firstis Naipaul’s affection towards animals, in particular domestic pets such ascats and dogs. This is the only time the otherwise detached, at times almosthaughty, Naipaul comes closest to betraying his emotions. And Africa provideshim with unending supply of starving kittens and dogs with skin conditions.Whenever possible Naipaul gives them milk or feeds them; on many occasions,however, he is a helpless observer to their misery. It is only when he is describing the plightof these animals that Naipaul’s prose appears to lose its cool, as in thefollowing paragraph:

‘The land is full of cruelty which is hard forthe visitor to bear. From the desert countries to the north long-horned cattleare sent for slaughter here in big, ramshackle trucks, cargoes of misery thatbump along the patched and at times defective autoroutes to Abidjan, to theextensive abattoir area near the docks. And there in trampled and vile blackearth these noble creatures, still with dignity, await their destiny in thesmell of death, with sometimes a calf, all alone, without a mother, findingcomfort of sort in sleep, a little brown circle on the dirty ground, togetherwith the beautiful goats and sheep assembled for killing. The ground around dthe abattoir goes on and on. When sights like these meet the eyes of the simplepeople every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.’

A tad overthe top, perhaps, towards the end, but heartfelt; it seems almost as if thatNaipaul reserves such empathy as he has for the animals and has nothing leftfor the humans.

The secondstream is Naipaul’s anxieties about money. He comes across as a miser. In histravels he visits a number of shrines, tombs, witchdoctors, and soothsayers indifferent countries. And they all want money or gifts, which Naipaul is mostreluctant to give them. In almost every meeting with the medicine-men andtribal chiefs he is inwardly calculating and agitating about how much it isgoing to cost him, worried that he might be ripped off. And the funny thing ishe does not pay for anything on even a single occasion; he makes his Africanguides pay the money every time. In one visit to a tribal chief in Ghana,Naipaul is expected to present the chief with a bottle of schnapps (the onlyalcoholic drink the chief is allowed to accept) which would then be offered aslibation to the ancestors. Naipaul does not take with him schnapps—which, youthink, wouldn’t have emptied his bank account—, and notes nonchalantly that itwas a good thing that his African guide had brought with him the liquor bottle.I didn’t quite know what to make of this (other than that it fit thedescription of Naipaul as skinflint in Paul Theroux’s memoir, SirVidia’s Shadow). It is quite funny, though I am not sure that it isintentional.

With a fewexceptions—Ghana and South Africa—Naipaul generally steers clear of thepolitical contexts of the countries he visits. I do not think it is anoversight on part of the great man, and absence of political context does notdetract a jot from the enjoyment the reader derives from the book. TheMasque of Africa is an attempt to examine the cultural, traditionalbeliefs of the African countries Naipaul visited and the extent to which thesebeliefs, subterranean under the Christian and Muslim dogmas, guide the dailylives of inhabitants; it is not a chronicle of the political upheavals in thesecountries, which, in any case, are too many (and too frequent, in some cases)to have been done justice to in this book.

Naipaul isa keen and acute observer. Nothing escapes him. This is his strength, as in hismeetings with the former military leader of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, and theformer wife of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela. Naipaul is in his elements whenhe describes these meetings. At other times, though, he strikes a slightlyshrill note in his descriptions of poverty and dirt (which seem to beeverywhere he goes); it tends to get a tad wearisome after a while. That is notto say however that what he has written is untrue. In one of the countries hevisits Naipaul is appalled by what he sees: the roads are in disrepair; garbagelitters the sides of the road, uncollected; trim bungalows are replaced byugly, corrugated shacks— themselves in dilapidated states; and the green hillshe remembered so well have all but disappeared. He writes simply:

‘It seemed to me I was in a place where acalamity had occurred.’

The countryis Uganda which saw its population, in the forty years since Naipaul firstvisited it, explode from 5 million in the 1960s to 30 million in the firstdecade of 21^st century, despite decades of civil war and AIDSepidemic, and which, lest we forget, was not without its own brand of racismwhen, during the tyrannical reign of Idi Amin, it persecuted and ultimatelydrove away tens of thousands of Asians who had lived peacefully in that countryfor generations, for no other reason than they were of a different race.

Over theyears Naipaul has been accused of many things by his detractors: misanthropy,misogyny, cruelty, racism and, following the publication of TheMasque of Africa, of Fascism (by Robert Harris who earns his living bywriting racy thrillers which, while they might be made into F grade Hollywoodfilms and fetch him a packet, would not require, it would be safe to assume, toexercise more than 10% of the neurones of an averagely intelligent person). Theviciousness of the attacks on Naipaul has reached a higher decibel since he wasawarded the Nobel. I have to say that none from the usual list of accusationsthrown at Naipaul was evident to me in Masque of Africa, which—give or takean odd loose sentence—is an honest attempt by a non-believer (ancient or modernreligions) to arrive at a humane understanding of the centuries-old Africanbeliefs.

The Masque of Africa is an outsider’s view of theAfrican countries he visits. The outsider does not claim to have specialknowledge of the African countries; he does not even claim to have specialaffection for these countries; neither does he have any pre-conceptions; he is avisitor who owes allegiance to no one and nothing save his artistic integrity.He sees, he notes, and he tells what he sees. If that makes some of usuncomfortable, that is of no concern to him.

And whenthe observer is the greatest living prose writer of our times the result is adazzling spectacle of melancholic beauty.

Books Read in 2011

2012-01-01T09:50:00.000-08:00

Below isthe list of books I read in 2011.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse)
Starter for Ten (David Nicholls)
The Pregnant Widow (Martin Amis)
The Dead Hand: Crime in Calcutta (Paul Theroux)
David Golder (Irene Nemirovsky)
The Bradshaw Variations (Rachael Cusk)
Beer in the Snooker Club (Waguhi Ghali)
The Indian Clerk (David Leavitt)
E2 (Matt Beaumont)
The New Confessions (William Boyd)
A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mante)l
Going Loco (Lynn Truss)
The Pyramid (William Golding)
Girls in their Married Bliss (Edna O'Brien)
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Monique Roffe)
Family Album (Penelope Lively)
Trespass (Rose Tremain)
Job (Joseph Roth)
Natural Curiosity (Margaret Drabble)
The Making of Henry (Howard Jacobson)
blueeyedboy (Joanne Harris)
The Good Angel of Death (Andrei Kurkov)
The Man in the Wooden Hat (Jane Gardam)
The Museum of Innocence (Orhan Pamuk)
Dial M for Merde (Stephen Clarke)
Solar (Ian McEwan)
At the Chime of A City Clock (D.J. Taylor)
Tiger Hills (Sarita Mandana)
The thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell)
Tiger's Wife (Tea Obreht)
The Summer of the Bear (Bella Pollen)
The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson)
The Hand that First Held Mine (Maggie O'Farell)
Kaddish for An Unborn Child (Imre Kerstez)
Sex and Stravinsky (Barbara Trapido)
Great House (Nicole Krauss)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
Imperial Bedrooms (Bret Easton Ellis)
Beatrice and Virgil (Yann Martel)
An American Type (Henry Roth)
Inheritance (Nicholas Shakespeare)
Another Part of the Wood (Beryl Bainbridg)e
The Concert Ticket (Olga Grushen)
Midnight Bell (Patrick Hamilton)
The Siege of Pleasure (Patrick Hamilton)
The Plains of Cement (Patrick Hamilton)
The Betraya (Helen Dunmore)
Libra (Don DeLillo)
The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Paul Torday)
Tinkers (Paul Harding)
The Hindi-Bindi Club (Monica Pradhan)
The Misogynist (Piers Paul Read)
Slaughterhouse 5 (Kurt Vonnegut)

Nonfiction

Nine Lives (William Dalrymple)
Elephant in the Room (Graham Swift)
A Feast of Freud (Clement Freud)
Small Memories (Jose Saramago)
One Morning in Sarajevo (David James Smith)
Indian Takeaway (hardeep Singh Kohali)
Swimming in a Sea of Death (David Rieff)
The Masque of Africa (V.S. Naipaul)
Mango Orchard (Robin Bayley)
Four Girls from Berlin (Marianne Mayerhoff)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
Uncle Tungsten (Oliver Sacks)
Stalin Ate My Homework (Alexi Sayle)
The Mango Orchard (Robyn Bailey)
Young Che: memories of Che Gueva (Ernesto Guevara Lynch)

My target, when the year began,was to read minimum of fifty books, ideally seventy five. I am happy with the eventual tally ofsixty nine.

I remember starting the yearwith non-fiction, as I wanted to read substantial non-fiction this year. In theend, as has happened every year, I ended up reading far more fiction thannon-fiction. That is because there simply aren’t very many non-fiction themesor subjects that interest me.

About the fiction I read thisyear. I read more than fifty novels, most of them literary, a fewgenre. When I look at the list the first thing that strikes me is that thereare awful lot of titles that did not live up to my expectation.

So, out of fifty four, whichnovels I really enjoyed reading? Not many, I am afraid.

Beer in the Snooker Club is the only novel written by the Egyptianwriter Waguih Ghali (written in English). I first became awarethat there was a writer called Ghali when, in 2009, I read Diana Athill’smemoir, After A Funeral. The memoir lays bare, in painful details (Athill hasmade a habit of publishing memoirs which are searingly painful, honestetcetera, in which she talks freely about her own foibles and somehow managesto emerge shining; it is not an easy trick to master), her relationship with anEgyptian writer who is referred to throughout as ‘Didi’. The memoirmentions that ‘Didi’ had written a novel by the publishing company for whichAthill worked as an editor, and that Athill had greatly liked the novel. Alittle bit of Internet search revealed that ‘Didi’ was an Egyptian writer namedWaguih Ghali and he had indeed written a novel entitled Beer in the Snooker Club. I ordered the book from Amazon and Iam glad I read it. Beer in the SnookerClub tells the story of an Egyptian Coptic Christian, Ramos, who isa poor member of an affluent and well connected joint family. The novel is setin the 1950s; the British have left the region, officially, but their presenceis very much there; the Suez crisis is still a few years away, but there is agrowing sense of nationalism amongst the Egyptians. The action, such as it is,takes place in Egypt and England. Novel, via various misadventures of itsprotagonist, gives a snapshot of the Egyptian upper classes during a period ofsocio-political upheaval in that country. Acutely observed—Ghali is at hiscaustic best while describing the pretensions of the Egyptian rich, or theBritish class system--, very funny and entertaining, Beer in the Snooker Club is a pleasure to read.

Jonathan Franzon’s Freedom is that rare event, in myview, when a novel lives up to all the pre-publication hype. This is a novelwhich is as good as they said it was, a first class read. I have reviewed Freedom on the blog.

Another first class read was DonDelillo’s Libra. Libra is animaginative reconstruction of the assassination of John F Kennedy, America's 35th president. Libra wasfirst published in 1988 and had created a bit of a kerfuffle at the time of itspublication. There are several strands in Libra which DeLillo handles withgreat aplomb. With great skill he creates for the reader a shadowy world withinworld. But, for me, his greatest skill is in humanizing Lee Harvey Oswald, thegunman who killed JFK (although theconspiracy-driven Libra hasits own take on it, which is different from that shown in Oliver’s Stone’s JFK, also full of conspiracy theories). DeLillo almostforces the reader to empathize with Oswald. Libra is a superb read.

The Jewish-American writerHenry Roth was an enigma. His debut novel, Call It Sleep (reviewed on this blog) is considered as a modern classic of the twentieth century. Call It Sleep was published in the 1930s. After that Henry Rothdisappeared from the literary world and did not publish another novel for sixtyyears (surely, the longest ever writer’s block in the history). Indeed when Call It Sleep enjoyed a revival inthe 1960s, many did not even known whether Roth was even alive. Roth made a triumphant return to fictionwriting in the 1990s (by that time he was well into his eighties) with an epicfour-volume novel-sequence, two of which were published after his death (in1995). In 2010 was published another, probably Roth’s last novel, An American Type, edited from theextensive notes Roth had left behind. Like all of Roth’s previously publishednovels, An American Type is highly autobiographical. The child protagonist of Call It Sleep is a grown man(although the name has changed), has published a novel which has attractedlukewarm praise from the critics, and is struggling with writer’s block. Roth's writing style is very lyrical,. There are some memorable charactersin An American Type, inparticular M (Roth’s wife in real life who, he said in an interview, savedhim), whom the protagonist marries towards the end of the novel. An American Type is not a novel tocheer you on a gloomy day, but a very worthwhile read.

Slaughterhouse 5 was the novel that made Kurt Vonnegut’sreputation. I was always under the impression that I had read Slaughterhouse 5. (I have had the novel in my collection for several years.) A chat with a frienddisabused me of the notion, and I read the novel in 2011. Vonnegut’spost-modern take on the Allied bombing of Dresden (that killed thousands in asingle day) towards the end of the Second World War may not be to everyone’staste, nor his minimalist style, heavy in irony. But I like it. I knew (even without reading it) that Slaugterhouse 5 was a great noveland reading it confirmed what I had always known.

The British writer PatrickHamilton is a largely forgotten name these days. If he is remembered at all, itis for the two plays he wrote—Rope and Gaslight—which were made into verysuccessful Hollywood films in the 1940s. (Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for herrole in Gaslight). In the1930s (when he was only in his twenties), Hamilton wrote three novels basedaround a fictional London pub named Midnight Bell. Originally publishedseparately, these three novels: Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure and Plainsof Cement were published in the 1930s as a compilation entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky.In 2005 the BBC adapted the novels as a drama with the same title (which Ihaven’t seen). The three novels—each oneis a compact little novel that can be enjoyed on its own—are interlinked andtell the stories of the lives of three protagonists which overlap. At timesHamilton’s prose is a bit mannered, but these chronicles—suffused with darkhumour— of the urban obsessions, frustrations, but also hope, are great reads.

Piers Paul Read is not a la mode author these days. Indeed sounfashionable was considered to be the subject of his last novel that it failedto find a publisher in the UK. The novel, Death of A Pope, was considered to betoo catholic for British tastes. (It was published in America by a small,independent publishing house.) Perhaps mindful of this, the protagonist of Read’smost recent novel, the provocatively titled The Misogynist, is an atheist. The Misogynist tells the tale ofa sixty something retired (and divorced) barrister who finds himselfincreasingly at odds with the society around him (at any rate what passes forsociety in London). The Misogynist is a neatly crafted novel, immenselyreadable not least because of the wry and ironic tone of the narrative. This isthe first Read novel I have read (I avoided reading him in the past because of thereputedly religious themes of his novels; However, based on The Misogynist, which I thoroughlyenjoyed, I ought to read more of him.)

I do not much read historicalfiction, in particular fiction that deals with remote historical events ofextraordinary significance, pullulating with real life characters. I amtherefore amazed that I took to reading APlace of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s behemoth of a novel (more than800 pages) covering the first four years of the French revolution, andabsolutely loved it. A Place of GreaterSafety is a mix of thriller, tragedy, intrigue and romance, told in abravura style—a compelling portrait of a society on the cusp of cataclysmicchanges.

Penelope Lively, the winner ofthe 1987 Booker Prize, is a prolific novelist, and has not let advancing age(she is nearing eighty) slow down her creative output. The range of Lively’snovels, depending on your view, is either well circumscribed or narrow. A lotof her novels are about the trials and tribulations of middle class families. Idon’t have any problem with that—better stick to what you know best. Family Album, Lively’s sixteenthnovel, is like a series of snapshots—it does not have a linear narrative—of amiddle class family between the 1970s and 1980s. The narrative is slightlydistracting because Lively changes from first to third person frequently. Icould cope with that; what I could not understand was why Lively felt the needto shift from past to present tense and vice versa in the middle of aparagraph. On the whole, though, FamilyAlbum is an intelligent and moderately absorbing tale.

Another ‘intelligent’, 'middle class' novel, of women plagued with the suspicion that their lives areunfulfilled, which I read in 2011, was Margaret Drabble’s Natural Curiosity. If you like to read novels of middle class,middle aged women who tie themselves in knots over what they said to whomand how, and desperately want to have affairs (I do; that is I like to readsuch novels), you will like NaturalCuriosity.

Girls in their Married Bliss is the third novel of Edna O'Brien’scelebrated Country Girls trilogy. I have reviewed the second novel of thetrilogy (Girl with Green Eyes),which I loved, on this blog. Girls intheir Marrried Bliss follows the lives of the guileless and lovableprotagonists who are married and living in London. It is a great read and,almost forty years after its publication, does not seem dated at all, thehallmark of a classic. It is difficult to believe that copies of O'Brien’sCountry Girl novels were burnt in Ireland because of the frank portrayal of thesexual lives of the protagonists.

I read two novels of theBritish comic writer Howard Jacobson in 2011: The Finkler Question, which won the 2010 Booker Prize and anearlier novel, The Making of Henry.The themes of many of Jacobson’s novels are the same: highly sexed, middle aged,academic Jewish men who are tortured about their Jewishness. The Finkler Question is slightlydifferent in that the protagonist, thus tortured, is not Jewish but suspectsthat he might be, or thinks he ought to be; I don’t exactly remember. But itdoes not matter, as, for me, the pleasure of reading Jacobson is his language.You cannot but marvel at the inventive way in which Jacobson turns a phrase. Itis a rare gift, and Jacobson is a seriously comic writer. He is a treasure.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand that First Held Mine wonthe Costa (previously Whitbread) award. It is a richly imagined and moving taleof how one’s past can’t be repressed indefinitely and is only waiting, withheavy suspense, to claim what is its due. Don’t be put off by its corny title: The Hand that First Held Mine is a verygood read.

David Mitchell is one of themost exciting and talented writers writing in English today. I have read two ofhis previous novels: Ghostwrittenand Cloud Atlas. Both werebrilliant reads. TheThousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, has, in contrast to these twonovels, a linear narrative, but its canvas is still expansive. The setting is Dejima, a man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, Japan, for centuries the only access the reclusive Japanese Empire would allow to the outside world, where the Dutch East Indies Company has a trading post. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is anambitious novel (another historical novel I read this year; but very differentfrom A Place of Greater Safety) of intrigue and drama, and Mitchell almost pulls it off. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoetmay not be a masterpiece, but it is still is gripping yarn.

Another Part of the Wood is oneof the early novels of the great Beryl Bainbridge. The novel is like aset-piece in a movie with a twist at the end. Written in Bainbridge’s trademarksparse style, Another Part of the Woodgives a glimpse into the type of novels Bainbridge would write in the 1970s (A Bottle Factory Outing and Injury Time, which I have reviewedon this blog).

David Golder is an early novel of Irene Nemirovsky (it might have been her first).Nemirovsky, of Russian Jewish descent, left for France with her family following the Boshevik revolution, where she achieved considerable success as awriter, and David Golder was one of her successful, if controversial novel.When the Nazis controlled France Nemirovsky went into hiding where she startedwriting another novel. She had not completed the novel when she was arrested,transported to Auschwitz and gassed immediately upon arrival. She was 39. Theincomplete manuscript was with Nemirovsky’s daughter, who could not bringherself to look at it for almost five decades. The incomplete novel, entitledSuit Francaise, was published to great acclaim a few years ago. The success ofthe novel created an interest in this until-then forgotten author and many ofher earlier novels are now available in English translation. David Golder is a character study ofa self-made man who, now that he is dying at 68, has realized that wealth hasnot brought him happiness. This novel (apparently also made into a successful French film in 1930) had created some controversy because of the portrayal of a Jewishman by a Jewish writer, which was considered to be unsympathetic. Nemirovasky wasregarded by some as a ‘self-hating Jew’. May be I am missing something, but Idid not find the portrayal of the novel’s eponymous hero unsympathetic. Goldermay be cold and ruthless and calculating, but he has a human side to him; theportrayal is not stereotypical or caricaturesque. A good read.

Matt Beaumont is not a name (Ithink) that is widely known outside of the UK. Which is a shame, as he is oneof the funniest writers I have read. I have read five novels of Beaumont, fourof which were comic novels and had me in splits. The novel I read in 2011 wasE2. It is a novel, like its predecessor (Beaumont’s debut novel), writtenentirely in e-mails sent by various employees of an advertising firm in London.It is a motley collection of the psychopaths, weirdoes, and insane. E2 is a hilarious read; I can't remember the last time I laughed so much when I read a novel.Beaumont’s humour is situational but he also makes liberal use of irony,exaggeration and sarcasm, to devastating effect.

The Indian Clerk is an interesting novel by the Americannovelist David Leavitt. It traces the last five years of the life of thecelebrated Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, during which Ramanujancollaborated with the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and left behind a bodyof work that ensured that his name would be remembered by posterity. The Indian Clerk is a very wellwritten ambitious, dense and expansive novel of great depth. A very satisfyingread.

Now the ‘also rans’.

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous writer, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2006. Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s mammoth novel (almost 700 pages) is, I believe, his first novel since the Nobel triumph. It tells the story of an obsessive love between a wealthy Turkish man and a poor woman (how unusual is that?) with a post-modern twist towards the end which we have come to expect from Pamuk. In the novel the reader is treated to long and over-zealous descriptions of the ravishing beauty of the heroine. The trouble is: in the absence of photographic evidence I was unable to appreciate the life-changing influence this great beauty came to have on the narrator’s life. Where the novel succeeds is in creating a vivid tabula of the Istanbul of the 1970s.

Imre Kerstez won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. Kerstez’s oeuvre is not large; he has written, I think, a total of three full-length novels, of which I think Fatelessness is truly brilliant. The other two, at just around hundred pages, are more like novellas. Of these I read Kaddish for an Unborn Child in 2011. It is a meditation by a Jewish Holocaust survivor on why he never had children. Kaddish for an Unborn Child is a lamentation on life that has lost its meaning for the one who is condemned to live it, a proloned burst of tortured introspection by a writer who is marked by Holocaust. The novel weighs you down with its melancholy, and the ennui is quadrupled by tortuous translation.

Joseph Roth’s reputation in the English speaking world is as a writer of nostalgic and achingly elegiac novels mourning the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Radetzky March). Job is Roth’s takes on the biblical story of Job. The novel is remarkable for Roth’s lyrical description of nature.

I have not read a single novel of William Boyd which I have disliked, and I didn’t dislike The New Confessions, one of Boyd’s early novels (published first in1988), which I read in 2011. The New Confession is a memoir of a Scotsman bornat the turn of the twentieth century. The story of the ultimately inconclusivelife of the enthusiastic, vain and (in some respect myopic) John James Todd isan absorbing enough tale; but Boyd has done it much better in Any Human Heart.

Nicole Krauss announced herself as a writer to watch out with her second novel, The History of Love. I had loved that novel; and it was with great expectations that I took to read Great House. Great House consists of several narratives at the centre of which is a desk. The plotting of Great House is fractured and the prose style is heavy, ponderous, and mostly monotonous. The novel was not a complete let-down, but it did not quite work for me.

Jane Gardam is a distinguished British novelist in the same tradition as Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge and Bernice Rubens (three amongst my favourite writers). She is one of the few authors who has won the prestigious Whitbread (now Costa) award twice. In 2005 Gardam published Old Filth, a story of a retired English barrister, to great critical acclaim. (Filth was an acronym for: Failed In London Try Hong Kong). The novel enjoyed considerable commercial success. The success of Old Filth probably prompted Gardam to publish The Man in the Wooden Hat, which is a kind of prequel to Old Fiilth and tells the story of 'Filth's' younger days in Hong Kong from the perspective of his wife. Written in Gardam's trademark no-fuss style, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a decent read, wryly funny in parts, but not as good, I am afraid, as Old Filth.

I read a Helen Dunmore novelafter many years, in 2011. Dunmore was the recipient of the inaugural Orange Prize forfiction for her novel, A Spell of Winter. I had read it at the time and it hadnot worked for me. I had therefore given a wide birth to Dunmore’s subsequentnovels. I decided to try The Betrayal, which I read was based on the so called‘Doctors’ Plot’, the last of Stalin’s act of vengeance against the educatedclasses, before his death in 1953. That interested me. The Betrayal is anovel—to borrow a football cliché—of two halves. The first half is brilliantlypaced and Dunmore builds up an atmosphere of unease. By comparison the secondhalf is slow, laborious and the ending is a tad anti-climactic (though historicallyaccurate).

I have read a few novels of theSouth African novelist Barbara Trapido. I thought that thesemi-autobiographical Frankie and Stankiewas brilliant. The rest (that I have read) were tolerable. Sex and Stravinsky, Trapido's most recent novel, is tolerablytolerable and mildly funny. It is like a feel-good Hollywood film, which you may enjoy while watching but should not make the mistake of taking it seriously eventhough it occasionally pretends it does. If you are looking for depth, here, you are diving at the wrong end.

Joanne Harris’s blueeyedboy is a thriller that hasthe most unreliable narrator in the history of world literature. The guy iseither a fantastist or an extremely cunning killer, you are not sure which; butby the time you come to the end of the novel which has more twists than acircus contortionist’s performance, you don’t really care; you simply can’ttake it all in; it is ridiculous. An easy read, though, perfect to take onholidays.

Nicholas Shakespeare is aBritish writer whose one previous novel I have read. It was called High Flyer and was a comedy ofmanners. Reading it had not convinced me that I should read more novels ofShakespeare, and for the past several years I had not read his novels, one ofwhich (Dancer Upstairs) wasmade into a film directed by John Malkovich. Inheritance, Shakespeare’s most recent novel, which I read in2011, is like two novels in one. The first one is a modern comedy of manners, whichworked for me. The second, a historical tale with the Armenian massacre as itsbackdrop didn’t.

Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicyclewas short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize in fiction. It has an interestingtheme—post-colonial Trinidad. In the novel Roffee tries to tackle big politicalthemes, but the novel essentially is of unserious nature; it merely scratchesat the surface. There are plenty of dramatic moments in the novel, but no realdrama. However it is an undemanding read.

The fashion designer-turned novelist Bella Pollen is perhaps best known for her novel Hunting Unicorns. I read Hunting Unicorns years ago, and while I can't remember anything about it, I remember that it was an enjoyable read. The summer of the Bear is Pollen's most recent novel, which has three strands: a le Carre style mystery surrounding the 'accidental' death of a British diplomat; a family tear-jerker, as the dead man's family comes to terms with his death; and the story of a bear in the title that thinks like humans and might be a reincarnation of the dead diplomat. The Summer of the Bear is a mildly captivating read, although the story of the bear does not really sit comfortably with the other two strands of the novel and the mystery is lame. I have included The Summer of the Bear in the 'also rans' and not 'disappointments', because I had no expectations from the novel when I started reading it.

Monica Pradhan's The Hindi-Bindi Club is a Chick Lit that tells the stories of the two generations of Indian women in America. The theme of the novel is very similar to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club. The novel is mildly witty and the stories are mildly riveting. I have included it here for the same reason I have included The Summer of the Bear: I had no expectations from the novel and I actually found myself smiling occasionally. At the end of each chapter Pradhan gives recipes of Indian dishes. These recipes have no connection to the story, but they are yummy. (I tried the almond and raisin chicken which, even if I say so myself, was delicious). If this does not persuade you to read The Hindi-Bindi Club I don't know what will.

Finally, there is Martin Amis.What are we to do with him? There are many who believe that Amis is past hissell by date. I disagree. However, PregnantWidow, Amis’s most recent tale of a bunch of teenagers (with enough hormones flowing to keep a Soho whorehouse in business for years) in theflower-power era, who spend a holiday in an Italian castle, does not find himin a sparkling form. That said, Martin Amis never lets me down totally. Thereare passages of great wit and humour in the novel, which is a descent read.

Now to the disappointments.

Cormac McCarthy is considered agreat American novelist. His The Roadwon the Pulitzer Award for Fiction in 2007, and was also made into a film. Setin a post-apocalyptic world in an unnamed country (presumably America) withoutany reference to past and future, The Road is a story of a father and sontravelling from one desolate scene to another. Sometimes they come across emptyhouses. The son is wary and tells his father to be careful. The father tellshim he will be careful. The son, frequently, is not convinced, but the fathertells him that they do not have a choice, and if they are at all to survive andnot die of starvation they will have to take their chances and enter the house.This happens repeatedly; the only variation is in what they encounter—sometimesit is a house, at other times it is a gas station, some other times it is anabandoned ship. As for what they find in these places, sometimes they findfood, sometimes they don’t. And . . . well, that’s about it. They stomp throughash; they sleep in ditches; they stomp through more ash; then they find anotherditch to sleep in. The novel is about as engaging as watching paint dry.

Another award winning fiction that failed to enthrall was PaulHarding’s Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Award for fiction. At justunder 200 pages Tinkers is not a big novel, but it is a slog. It is a slog fora number of reasons, one of them being there is no plot and no real story;instead Harding deluges the reader with pages after pages of impressionisticdescriptions of nature. The prose is belaboured and not particularly alluring. The novel,really, had no redeeming features for me. The only thing I learned afterreading Tinkers was that it is not possible to die of boredom.

Continuing with the theme of award-winning novels which are tediousbeyond endurance, it would be hard to find a more tedious novel than Tea Orbeht’s Tiger’s Wife (unless you have read Tinkers). This novel won the2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. Set in an unnamed country in an unnamed region(although less than subtle hints are dropped that the country is formerYugoslavia) Tiger’s Wife attempts to be an allegory and fable at the sametime, and manages to be neither. Like Tinkers,Tiger’s Wife, too, is full of descriptions of nature, which serve noother purpose than emphasizing that the author has nothing interesting to say.

By Nightfall has not won any awards as far as I am aware, butits author has. It is the latest offering from Michael Cunningham who won thePulitzer Prize for Fiction of his memorable The Hours. By Nightfalltales the story of the mid-life crisis of an art-dealer who seriously considerschanging his sexual orientation by contemplating to have an affair with hisbrother-in-law (don’t ask). True, Cunningham’s prose is crisp and finely rendered(although the protagonist’s proclivity to ask ironic, rhetorical inwardquestions and offer self serving faux-intellectual insights into his sillyinfatuation tends to grate on your nerves after a while), but that does notquite make up for the preposterous plot which seems more like a gay man’ssexual fantasy about the hidden homoerotic impulses residing withinheterosexual men.

I do not find William Golding, the 1981 Nobel Laureate, an easy read. Apartfrom TheLord of the Flies, I have not read any novels of Golding, although,over the years, I have bought quite a few, which line my shelf (they lookgood). I read The Pyramid, which was described as Golding’s most accessiblenovel. The Pyramid depicts three episodes in the life of a young man, namedOliver. These episodes have little in common except that they take place in thesame obscure English village. The premise of The Pyramid is ratherslender. Golding touches upon some universal themes and there are a few funnyscenes in the novel, especially the second section; but the novel, overall, hasa bumpy, uneven feel to it. The Pyramid might be Golding’s mostaccessible novel, but it is not the more absorbing for it.

Ian McEwan is one of the leading British novelists of our times. He isa novelist who has managed to be commercially successful and be a hit with thecritics. I have read quite a few of McEwan’s novels and with the exception ofan early novel, have not liked any of them. Solar, McEwan’s latestoffering, has all the elements that I associate with his novels: it isover-long, verbose, and full of redundant information, with the usualsplattering of the grotesque and macabre. The comedy, such as it is, fails to bring a smile to your face. The thematic focus is not sharp andthe narrative is not particularly gripping. Reading Solar is like watching a performance of a stand-up comedian, desperately trying to be funny and telling an over-long anecdote (which is not funny at all), oblivious that the audience has lost interest.

The Canadian writer Yann Martel won the 2002 Booker Prize with his second novel, Life of Pi. Life of Pi was a wonderful fable with sparkling, lustrous prose. Eight years later Martel published Beatrice and Virgil, another allegory and fable. This time round Martel attempts to convey the horror of the Holocaust through an anthropomorphic donkey (Beatrice) and monkey (Virgil). It is painful to read Beatrice and Virgil: there is no driving force to the narration (despite the powerful theme of Holocaust at its heart) with its bland, flat, laborious prose, full of strange metaphors. It can be considered an achievement of sort to write a novel on the theme of Holocaust that is a cure for insomnia, although I doubt that was Martel's intention. Beatrice and Virgil is clearly a work of a writer who is struggling with the Writer's Block.

Olga Grushin is a Russian-American writer of considerable merit. Her début novel, The Dream Life of Sukhonov, was a triumph; I loved that novel. It was therefore with great expectations that I began reading The Concert Ticket (I think it is published in America under the title The Line). The Concert Ticket takes its inspiration from the 1962 concert given by the exiled Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and weaves a tale of ordinary people who are coping with the miseries of their quotidian existence with the hope of something truly magnificent that may or may not materialise. The problem is the plot-structure is too anaemic to bear the weighty themes Grushin wants to convey. The novel is too long, and the reader's fatigue is increased by Grushen's overworked, over-elaborate, over-luxurious, and flowery prose. Grushin had kept in check her tendency to carve out exquisite sentences in The Dream Life of Sukhonov, but in The Concert Ticket, the genie is out of the bottle; the novel overflows with metaphors, which, nevertheless, fails to camouflage the fact that Grushin does not have a great deal to say. This novel is killed by a fatal overdose of over-exquisite prose.

Reading Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms gives you a kind of de ja vu. That is because Ellis has been doing the same thing again and again for the past twenty five years since he burst on to the literary scene with Less than Zero (many characters in Less than Zero also appear in Imperial Bedrooms): characters that are not likeable (some of them deranged), who lead shallow lives; torrid sex scenes; and gruesome, gratuitous violence. Imperial Bedrooms is a kind of noir delivered in Ellis's trademark minimalist style. But Ellis really needs to move on. What shocked in American Psycho is merely tiresome in Imperial Bedrooms. Perhaps fellow brat pack writer Jay McInerney (who I always thought was more talented than Ellis) can teach his friend how to change the trajectory of his novels and move beyond shallow, materialistic teenagers.

Rose Tremain is an award-winning British novelist. In Trespass, her most recent novel, Tremain endeavours to weave a tale of suspense and intrigue, delving into darker corners of human mind. Unfortunately not very successfully. None of the main characters is particularly believable; there is not a great deal of suspense; and the story is about as chilling as a stroll through the isles of Iceland. A disappointment.

Paul Theroux’s A Dead Hand: Crime in Calcutta is adisaster. Words fail me to describe how awful the novel is. Theroux used to bea very good writer; there are many novels of his which I have thoroughlyenjoyed. I am not even going to bother describing the plot of ADead Hand: Crime in Calcutta. Don’t read it.

Enough about fiction. There area few other novels I read about which I havewritten earlier on the blog.

A bit about non-fiction.

I did not read a lot ofnon-fiction in 2011. Of the 15 non-fiction books there were a few memoirs, thebest and one I enjoyed the most was TheYoung Che: Memories of Che Guevara. The memoir was originally publishedin Spanish in the 1980s as two volumes. The English translation which came outin 2007 combines the two volumes in one. Written by Che Guevara’s father (also,somewhat confusingly, called Ernesto Guevara), the memoir focuses on CheGuvera’s early life as a child growing up in Argentina and his training as adoctor. Based extensively on the copious letters Che Guevara wrote to hisfamily, the memoir is a moving and absorbing read that gives an insight intothe mind of the man who smilingly went to his death in a remote corner of theworld (at the hands of CIA agents) and who, more than forty years after hisdeath remains an iconic figure. Five stars.

Alexi Sayles used to be aslightly unhinged (and popular) left-wing stand-up comedian in the 1980s and1990s, before he gave that up and made an apparently successful transition tofiction writing. I have read one of his novels; I think it was called Overrun. I remember much of thisnovel except that it was funny in parts and not very impressive. Stalin Ate My Homework is Sayles’smemoir of growing up as the only child of left-wing parents in the 1960s Liverpool, UK. Thememoir is engaging in parts and Sayles has drawn memorable portraits of bothhis parents, especially his Jewish mother, Molly. In 2010 I read a delightfulmemoir, entitled When Skateboards willbe Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh, of being brought up by a single motherwho was convinced that there would be a Communist revolution in America. Saylescomes from a less dysfunctional family than Sayrafiezadeh's, but his parents werenot any less eccentric in their political views than Sayrafiezadeh’s.

Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten is a nostalgic tripdown the memory lane for Sacks to his childhood in London and his fascinationwith chemicals which he shared with one of his many maternal uncles. Engagingin parts.

Four Girls from Berlin is a memoir by Marianne Meyerhoff which tellsthe story of her Jewish mother who escaped from the clutches of the Nazis justin time (her parents and brother were not so lucky) to arrive in America. It isa moving tale of a life unfulfilled and talent gone waste. There is a twist at the end, which hits you hard because you know that it is not imagined.

Jose Saramago, who died a fewyears ago, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. In Small Memories we find the greatPortuguese writer looking back upon his childhood. Full of amusing anecdotes(such as how the family came to have the surname ‘Saramago’) Small Memories is an utter delightto read. What strikes you the most when you finish reading Small Memories isthat there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in Saramago’s background andchildhood that suggests that he was going to be, in fullness of time, therecepint of a prestigious literary award, a proof, if proof be needed, thatgreat writers are born, not made.

Swimming in A Sea of Death is a memoir of the last months in the life of the feminist Susan Sontang, written by her son. The picture that emerges of Sontong (who died of cancer) is of a brittle, fragile woman: a woman who,on the one hand simply refused to accept her mortality; who, as her sonmentions at one point in the memoir, had come to regard herself as ‘special’,after her previous successful battles against two cancers; on the other hand,as she hovered up information on the deadly blood cancer realised that thistime she was fighting a battle she was not going to win. She tells her son,‘this time I don’t feel special.’ Sontag subjected herself to excruciating treatmentsincluding the bone marrow transplant which, according to doctors wasgoing to be tricky given Sontag’s age (they were right). Sontag, depending on yourview, either went down fighting all the way, or subjected herself to avoidablepain and misery had she accepted the inevitable and agreed to palliative care. Swimming in A Sea of Death is a meditation on death and what it means to die in Western civilizations.

One Morning in Sarajevo is an account of the assassination of theArchduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, inSarajevo, Bosnia, in 1914, an event that propelled Europe towards the FirstWorld War that killed millions. The book also throws light on the lives of theyoung men 9About whom not a lot is known) who plotted to kill the heir apparent. It is not an easy book toread, but informative. Well worth the trouble if the subject interests you.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is one of the best pieces of investigative journalism I ahve read in recent times. That is probably not saying much, as I do not read many pieces of investigative journalism. But believe me, this book is superb. It traces the life of a poor black American woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks who died sometime in the early 1950s from a particularly aggressive type of cancer of uterus. However, the samples of cancerous cells taken from Henrietta's diseased organ, for reasons the scientists could not fathom, did not die, and stayed alive in culture for long periods. This presented the scientists with a unique opportunity to grow and study behaviour of cells in a number of conditions (using Henrietta's cells for culture mediums in which the cells grew), which, as the cliché goes, expanded the frontiers of human knowledge. In due course Henrietta's cells, which scientists labelled HeLa, were commercialised and many people became rich beyond belief. No marks for guessing that the dead woman's family was completely unaware of these developments and remained mired in poverty. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot, with great tact and sensitivity, gives a balanced picture to the reader. It is a smashingly good read.

In Nine Lives William Dalrymple tells stories of nine remarkableindividuals he meets during his travels in India. Some of the stories (I presume they are truestories) are so unusual that they stretch the limits of yourcredulity. India is a strange land.

Finally, I come to Masque of Africa by V.S. Naipaul. Ishall review this book later this month.

My top ten novels of 2011

Beer in the Snooker Club (Waguih Ghali)
Libra (Don DeLillo)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)
Girls in their Married Bliss (Edna O'Brien)
Slaughterhouse 5 (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Finkler Question (Howard Jacobson)
An American Type (Henry Roth)
Plains of Cement (Patrick Hamilton)
The Misogynist (Piers Paul Read)
E2 (Matt Beaumont)

Since I read only 15 books of non-fiction, I shall list below my top five non-fiction books of 2011.

Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara (Ernesto Guevara-Lynch)
Masque of Africa (V.S. Naipaul)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
Small Memories (Jose Saramago)
Four Girls from Berlin (Merlin Meyerhoff)

Remembering W.G. Sebald

2011-12-17T01:47:00.000-08:00

W.G. Sebaldwas a German academician who had a distinguished career in England. When hedied, ten years ago to this day, Sebald was the professor of EuropeanLiterature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) for more than a decade.

If Sebaldhad only been an academician (he published several papers on European writers in academic journals), perhaps he would not be remembered beyond a smallcircle of academicians and professors of European literature.

Sebald alsowrote novels. At the time of his untimely death in 2001, it would not be anexaggeration to say that Sebald’s reputation in the UK as a writer of great meritwas on an upward swing. Indeed there were some who felt he would win the NobelPrize in Literature. (Not as fanciful as it may sound. In 2007, Horace Engdahl,the former secretary of the Swedish academy, mentioned Sebald as one of therecently diseased writers who would have been a worthy laureate.) Sebald had,by that time, published four novels, all written in German, originally, andpublished in his native Germany earlier than their English translations. Hisfirst novel was published in Germany in 1990, but its English avatar appeared only in 1999 (Vertigo).His first novel to appear in English translation was The Emigrants, which cameout in 1996. In 1998 was published The Rings of Saturn. The last novelto come out was Austerlitz, published in 2001.

Austerlitz is one of the most moving novels Ihave read. It tells the story of a lonely, melancholy man, brought up as anonly child by a Welsh Calvinist preacher and his valetudinarian wife. The man,Fred Astaire, meets the novel’s unnamed narrator when both men are in Antwerp,and a kind of acquaintanceship develops between the two. As the novelprogresses, we learn that Fred Astaire was born Jacques Austerlitz. Austerlitzis a man, like the protagonists of Sebald’s other novels, burdened withmemories. The burden, in this case, is puzzling, even to the man carrying theburden, because he is not actually consciously aware that he is carrying theburden. Gradually, as years go by, via chance encounters and apparentlyunrelated events, the memories, suppressed since childhood, break through, andslowly Austerlitz becomes painfully aware of his identity. The novel is abrilliant amalgamation of (apparent) facts and history. Right from the first page, an atmosphere of oppressive melancholy and peril envelops the reader.Austerlitz’s journey of self-discovery which brings him face to face with thehorror of what happened to his parents and his people breaks your heart.Austerlitz is a man who carries with him a secret, and his torture is all themore because he does not know what the secret is. When he finally discovers it,it devastates him. I can remember very few novels which have overwhelmed mewith their powerful emotional ambiance. Austerlitz is one of those novels,which, as far as I am concerned, is all the more remarkable because it is atranslated work of fiction. I wonder what effect it would have had on me, had Ibeen able to read German, the language in which the novel was originallypublished. (In an interview Sebald said that there were three and a half realpersons behind Austerlitz. One of them was a person about whom he watched adocumentary by ‘sheer chance’. This person was an ‘apparently English’ womanwho was brought up in Wales in a Calvinist household. She had been brought toEngland with her twin. The twin had died and the woman grown up without knowingthat she had a twin or her origins were in a Munich orphanage.)

To write anovel on the theme of the Holocaust is a formidable challenge. What Sebald hasachieved in Austerlitz is astounding. It is a superb novel; a toweringachievement.

The Emigrants is another novel of Sebald I haveread and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Like Austerlitz, the novel isa potent and powerful mixture of history, autobiography and meditativediscursions. In The Emigrants, Sebald tells apparently factual stories of fourmen and the devastation that the Second World War brought to their lives. TheEmigrants is a work of fiction, though it is presented as factualaccounts (one of the portraits is of Sebald’s great uncle). As in Austerlitz,there is the unnamed narrator, born, like his creator in 1944, in the waningyears of the Third Reich, and who (again, like his creator) lives elsewhere butreturns time and again, almost against his wishes, to the country of his birth.

The Emigrants is a strange, haunting novel. Itwas Sebald’s first novel to appear in English.He was past fifty when the novel was first published in England, his adoptedcountry where he had lived since 1966 and, upon its publication, many must havewondered where he was hiding all those years.

The Rings of Saturn (which I have in my collection buthave not yet read) is a digressive account of its morose narrator (also namedW.G. Sebald) through East Anglia (county Suffolk). When The Rings of Saturnappeared the world of literature had begun to take notice of Sebald as a writerof considerable merit, and the novel received very favourable reviews. Sebaldhowever was at pains to clarify that despite spending more than 25 years inEngland he still did not feel at home here. In an interview he said that hewould feel more at home in a hotel in Switzerland (or something to thateffect).

I have alsoread the only work of non-fiction of Sebald that has (so far) appeared inEnglish: On the Natural History of Destruction. Like all of Sebald’swork there was a gap of several yearsbetween the original and its English translation. The book (based on lectures Sebald gave in Zurich, in 1997) was published in Germany in 1999.The English translation came out two years after Sebald’s death, in 2003. In Onthe Natural History of Destruction Sebald describes and discusses theallied campaign towards the end of the Second World War. It is a powerful andstriking book. Sebald does not beat around the bush in pointless euphemisms. Hecomes straight to the point. The Book starts with the sentence:

‘Today it is hard to form an even partlyadequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities ofGermany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think aboutthe horrors involved in that devastation.’

Then comesthe statistics: 1 million tons of bombs were dropped on 131 Germancities—repeatedly on some of them—most of which were flattened. More than halfa million German civilians were killed in these raids; 3.5 million homes weredestroyed; and, as the war finally came to its bloody end, 7.5 million were left homeless. More mind-numbing statistics follow: in Dresden, in February1945 (when the Third Reich was in its last throes), the SS burned 7000 corpsesin one day, civilians killed in one day by the allied bombing. (Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel, Slaughterhouse 5, was based on the bombing of Dresden, although Vonnegut's treatment of the subject was post-modern.) When Hamburg was bombed (combined British and American operation,codenamed ‘Operation Gomorrah’!) the flames of the fires that engulfed the cityleapt up 2000 meters towards the sky. Sebald tells about a writer named Victor Golllancz who spent a month in theBritish occupied zone of Hamburg, Dusseldorf and the Ruhr. Gollancz particularlynoted the profound lethargy of the Germans, which, he remarked, was the moststriking feature of the contemporary German urban population. ‘People driftabout in such lassitude,’ he wrote, ‘that you are always in danger of runningthem down when you happen to be in the car.’

Whatintrigued and shocked Sebald, in equal measures, was the collective silence ofthe German people about this unprecedented and unparalleled and wanton (and, itmight be argued, with some justification, unnecessary) destruction of theirland by the enemy. He writes at one point in the book:

‘. . .with remarkable speed social life, that other natural phenomenon, revived. People’sability to forget what they don’t want to know, to overlook what is beforetheir eyes, was seldom put to test better than in Germany at that time.’

It was asif, Sebald wrote, ‘the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt bymillions [of Germans] in the last years of the war had never really foundverbal expression, and those directly affected by the experience neither sharedit with each other nor passed it on to the next generation.’

The collective amnesia, it would appear, also affectedthe writers. Very few writers, Sebald notes, chose to write about the ingloriousend to the Second World War culminating in ‘national humiliation’. One of themwas the Henrich Boll, who won the Nobel Prize in literature. Boll’s ‘melncholynovel of the ruins’ (Sebald wrote), Der Engel Schwieg, 'was withheld fromthe reading public for over forty years'.

The book, upon its publication in Germany, triggeredfurious debate. Sebald was said to have been taken aback by the letters hereceived from Germany, many blaming the Jews for the Bombings. ‘This wasapplause from quarters,’ he said, ‘you did not need.’

On the Natural History of Destructionis an essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the madness of theSecond World War.

Sebald is not an easy writer to read. I suspect that he was not an easy writer to translate either. (He was presumably proficient in English language and, although, Like Elais Canetti, he chose to write in German, his mother-tongue (it was Canetti's third language), he took great interest in and closely supervised (like Canetti) the English translations of his books.) Sebald remarked on one occasion that hismedium was ‘prose, not novel’. That is apparent in all his books I haveread. There is a kind of ‘stream of consciousness’ quality to his writing. Hiswriting is not dramatic;if anything it is anti-dramatic. It is discursive and meandering at times, yet ittouches your heart. The novels that I have read were, so I felt, meditations on memory andpast which come to have a profound effect on our present in ways we don’talways envisage or understand. Sebald had the ability to get to the core with minimum of fuss.

Austerlitz,Sebald’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest novels in the last hundred years,was published in the same year he died, at the age of 57, in a car accident inNorwich. Sebald was at the peak of his powers when he died, and one wonderswhat he would have achieved had he lived. His untimely death was a great lossto literature.

Jeremy Clarkson: Why Does He Say These Things?

2011-12-08T11:49:00.001-08:00

Jeremy Clarkson created a bit of akerfuffle at the beginning of the month, on the BBC programme called The One Show.

For those who do not know what The One Show is, here is a link. It isaired on the BBC every day of the week in the evening, around 19.00 hours. Iwatch it very rarely these days. I watched it when it first started airing,which was a few years ago. It was a dull programme featuring pointless topical reports (rising water levels in Rutland Waters) and interviews with non-entities. The programme was presented by aprematurely greying corpulent man with a face like a baked potato, and a thinwoman who spoke in Irish accent (probably because she was Irish).

The corpulent man with a face like a bakedpotato had the air of someone who had decided, probably around the time he grewpubes, that he was a catch and was not prepared to let go of the mistaken notiondespite the mounting evidence to the contrary. The woman who spoke with Irishaccent, for reasons best known to her (but others could guess at), had decidedto accentuate the Potato Head’s grandiose delusion by responding to every lamecomment he made as if he was the greatest wit since Groucho Marx. Then thePotato Head left the programme and ‘defected’ to the rival ITV. I think henow fronts its sports programme, where he makes similar lame comments as the ones he usedto make on The One Show, which arenot funny in the least. His co-presenter, the woman who spoke in Irish accent,left The One Show soon after thePotato Head left the show, and I remember reading somewhere that that wasbecause the two of them were having it off. The Potato Head also divorced hiswife, I think. (I guess I could google these two to find out whether all ofthis is correct, but I am not interested really in these two—despite thehundreds of words I have wasted on them so far—; the person I want to writeabout, and I shall come to him in due course, is Jeremy Clarkson. Besides, lifeis too short to find out about what P-listed celebrities on Britishtelevision get up to in their sordid little lives. As a further aside, I thinkit is a good ploy to start anything about which you are ignorant but want to bedismissive with the words ‘Life is too short . .’. When you use these words,you are conveying that while you accept you are pig-ignorant about the subjectmatter, you are ignorant by choice. There are more interesting or pressingmatters clamouring for your attention and they take priority over the subjectmatter you are choosing to beignorant about, because it is notimportant.)

Anyway, back to The One Show. The show is now fronted by another man (who, fromcertain angles has a passing resemblance, I think, to the monkeys in theextremely addictive on-line game on my mobile called Angry Birds—Rio) and a woman whodoes not speak in Irish accent and has a bit more flesh on her than the womanwho spoke in Irish accent.

Now to Jeremy Clarkson. He is a BritishJournalist and television presenter. He is a man, I should think, in hisfifties (although you wouldn’t think so looking at his face; he has—there is nokinder way of saying this—not aged well, probably as a result of spending too much time in the sunfor his television programme). He is about six foot tall, has a beer gut, and he hailsfrom Doncaster. He is not a sight for the sore eyes (or stomachs) and hisinsistence on wearing crumpled jeans and jackets (which are tight below hisarmpits) is unfortunate.

What we have established so far is:(a) Clarkson comes from the part of British isles where I wouldn’t have thoughtthere are many who are members of Mensa; (b) he is not pretty; and (c) he hasroughly the same relationship to style as a bald man has to a comb.

Yet this man of below average looks andphysiognomy that betrays his partiality to lager (and pies), is one of the mostsuccessful (ipso facto richest)broadcaster, presenter, and journalist in the UK today.

How has Clarkson managed it? For a start,he is white and male, which are always good things to have under your belt ifyou want to be successful in Britain. Mind, being white and male do notguarantee success that would make others green, but it helps.

There may be other reasons that can explainClarkson’s success. He probably thinks, as many successful people delude themselves, that hedeserves his success and has worked very hard for it. Others might think he isone of those on whom Lady Luck has smiled.

There is no doubt that Clarkson is aforceful presence on the television programme he co-presents with two otherblokes. (That one of the other two looks like a hamster and will probably needa ladder to reach the breast level of any woman who is not a dwarf, and theother who sports shoulder length hair which would have been absolutely perfectfor him if he were a slim young adult and not a middle-aged bloke with a tired,puffy face, helps.) The television programme Clarkson presents is called Top Gear, which, as the imaginativetitle suggests, is about cars. I have never been able to bring myself to watchany of the Top Gear programmes frombeginning to end, although I know blokes (usually single men who wouldn’t getlaid in a women’s prison with a handful of pardon papers) who are addicted tothis programme. I used to know a guy who used to tape these programmes and onSundays watched them one after another the whole afternoon. I mean, if the sightof middle aged men (none good looking) going into raptures about, I don’t know,Nissan Sunny ZX coupe or a Lotus Turbo SE sends you into raptures then thisprogramme is your ticket. If on the other hand you hold the view that middleaged men (none good looking) talking in a faux-macho manner (calling AudiQuattro, a turbo-motherf**ker) is indescribably sad, then give this programme amiss. That said on the few occasions when I saw part of the programme, Ithought Clarkson managed to look the most impressive and witty of the threepresenters (which, it might be argued, is not that difficult when the other twopresenters have the personalities of a washing machine and oratorical skills ofa dishwasher).

Jeremy Clarkson, I am happy to confirm, isone of the presenters of an immensely popular car programme on the BBC.

He is also an entertaining writer. He used to write—probably still does—weekly columns for The Sunday Times. It is these columnswhich made me admire Clarkson (although not so much that I would pay £ 2 everyweek to access the Times website). Clarkson is a witty writer. His view pointis almost always right of the centre and contrarian. The humour relies heavilyon figures of speech such as hyperbole (liberal), irony (heavy), sarcasm (frequent),paradox (ditto) and litote (occasional). He has pet hates and dislikes which heexpresses in a funny, if stereotypical, manner: French are cowards, Germans arehumourless, Americans are fat and simple, Russians are unscrupulous etcetera. Thesecolumns have been published as compilations and some of them have gone on tobecome bestsellers in the UK.

The image that Clarkson has—perhaps he hasdeliberately cultivated it—is of a grouchy curmudgeon who is griping all the time aboutanything and everything. His brand of humour is sour.

Earlier this month Clarkson was on The One Show, where he was asked hisviews about the public sector workers who were striking on that day.

A brief background to the strike is asfollows. Britain, like the rest of European countries, is in the midst of theworst recession since the last worst recession. The recession was brought aboutby the greed of Bankers and the insistence of the great British Public on livingbeyond its means for years. The government’s coffers are emptying, and theBritish Chancellor, George Osborne (who always looks as if he is a couple of hundredbowel motions behind the game), in-between his hectic schedule of skiing holidays in Switzerland (where he spent £17,000 in ten days) and summer vacations in San Francisco (we are all in this together, remember?), has decided that the public sector will pay. Thegovernment has proposed sweeping changes in the salaries and pensions of the publicsector workers. Needless to say that the public sector workers are not happyabout it, and, at te beginning of this month, heeding calls from their union, more than 2/3^rdof the public sector workers went on strike.

It was this strike about which Clarkson wasasked his view on The One Show.

Clarkson said that he would have thestriking workers shot in front of their families. This was followed by atypical Clarkson type rant about the ‘gold plated’ pensions of the publicsector workers. He left no one in doubt that he disapproved of the strikingworkers, although he was prepared to see the positive side of the strike. (Theroads were empty so that he could drive his car very fast on the emptystreets). In the same programme, he also expressed his annoyance at people whokill themselves by jumping in front of trains and delaying those on the trains(who presumably want to live).

The presenters looked visibly startled anduneasy as Clarkson ranted. Which suggests that either they were not informed bythe producers what Clarkson was going to say or they are very good actors.Because, as Clarkson clarified to the Times (as quoted in the Guardian), his comments were not off thecuff. Before the programme he had had a meeting with the producers of theprogramme, going over the topics they wanted him to speak on, and he had giventhem an idea what he was going to say (he says).

There was a furore over Clarkson’s remarks.The public sector workers were not pleased and the BBC was flooded with four thousand complaints (three thousand and ninety nine of them probably from Dave Prentis). Prentis, general secretary of Unison, the union thatgave the clarion call to strike, was beside himself with rage. He felt thatClarkson’s comments were ‘revolting’, ‘totally outrageous’, and ‘cannot betolerated’. (Of course these commentswere outrageous and provocative and calculated to cause upset. That’s whatClarkson does. He can give a master class in being outrageous. He can start hisown MBA in being egregious. The man is a wind-up merchant.)

Prentis demanded that Clarkson be sacked bythe BBC and revealed that the union was seeking legal advice about what furtheraction they could take against Clarkson and the BBC and whether his commentsshould be referred to the police. Prentis went on to suggest that if anychildren were watching the programme they could have been ‘scarred and upset byhis [Clarkson’s] aggressive statements’.

I do not know whether Prentis contacted thePolice about Clarkson’s ‘outrageous’ comments. Since we have not heard anythingon the matter (so far), I assume that common sense has prevailed or else Prentisdid contact the Police and was asked to go for a walk and find sex elsewhere. Ishould also doubt very much that there are young children all over the countrywaking up screaming in the middle of night, complaining of nightmares in whicha fat, balding, middle aged man is shooting people in front of their families. Icannot believe that any children watched TheOne Show in the first place. In fact I cannot believe anyone between the ages of one to hundred would willingly watch The One Show which a crap programme.

Jeremy Clarkson, uncharacteristically,issued an apology, clarifying (to dolts deficient in humour) that he was jokingwhen he made those comments. I believe Clarkson was almost telling the truth. Ithink he was making a point, using crude humour. That’s his style—to make jokesand comments that have the subtlety of a panzer.Sometimes it works; on this occasion it did not. That is the risk you take whenyou make crude jokes and ‘outrageous statements’. You run the risk ofoffending people.

It is beyond the scope of this post to gointo the moral rights and wrongs of public sector workers going on strike(although that is not because I can’t make up my mind about it; I may not haveany talent, but I have tons of opinion. I should say here that I know a fewpeople who work in the public sector; they do very difficult jobs and I havealways been impressed by their dedication and enthusiasm. Not everyone workingin the public sector is a ‘Waste Disposal Strategic Advisor’ or ‘VolunteersProgramme Coordinator'. Many have proper jobs, far more valuable than the useless jobs of the greedy toads in the Private Sector). Dave Prentis and his friends need to takea chill-pill, though. Clarkson’s comments need to be ignored. The other Dave(Cameron) got it right (for a change) when he said that Clarkson’s comments were silly. It isnot worth taking them (or Clarkson) seriously. He probably does not take them(or himself) seriously.

Book of the Month: One Day (David Nicholls)

2011-12-02T11:33:00.001-08:00

DavidNicholl’s debut novel, Starter for Ten, was a big successand was later made into a film. His second, The Understudy, was arelatively low-key affair. A friend read Starter for Ten and opined thatNicholls ‘can write’, but there is ‘no substance in the book’. I thought I would read Starterfor Ten (along with Victoria Hislop’s The Island), if I went on aholiday. Which I haven't done this year. Then I read One Day, David Nicholls’s third novel.

Why did I buy One Day instead of reading Starter for Ten which I already had in my collection? What can I say? I like to be unpredictable.

Througha series of snapshots of a day—15^th July, the St Swithin’s day, tobe exact—repeated at yearly intervals over two decades, starting from 1988, OneDay traces the lives of twofriends— Emma Morley and Dexter Meyhew. The two meet on the graduation day atEdinburgh University where they had spent the previous four years. Emma had noticedand liked the handsome Dexter ever since she saw him at a party in her firstyear at the University, but had had not done anything about it because she did not want to risk being spurned by Dexter who she suspects is posh and therefore in a different league. Emma has aworking class background and speaks with such pronounced Northern accent thatsome of her university acquaintances think it is an affectation, theirmisconception strengthened by Emma’s socio-political views which are to theleft of Lenin. She is the sort of girl who regards ‘bourgeois’ as a term ofabuse, reads Unbearable Lightness ofBeing, and has photographs of Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara adorning thewalls of her room. Dexter, who indeed comes from a very comfortable middleclass background, has little reason to take notice of Emma, surrounded as he isby a bevy of girls who are only too keen to wrap themselves around him likeUnion Jack. He finally notices Emma—despite her attempts to spoil her goodlooks by intimidating spectacles—at the graduation ceremony, and the two spendthe night in her room, ‘cuddling’ and ‘kissing’, and speculating what mightthey do with the rest of their lives. Dexter is taking a gap year—theobligatory rite of passage for the children of affluent parents—so that he canfind himself in countries like India and Thailand. Beyond that he has no ideaof what he is going to do other than a vague notion that he wants to besuccessful, make his parents proud and sleep with more than one woman at thesame time. Emma entertains the romantic notion of being courageous, making adifference and changing lives through maybe art, and writing beautifully(Awwww). Neither, on this last night as students, is under the illusion thatthey will see much of the other over the years, although neither has thestomach to actually say so. Emma would like to see more of Dexter but knows shewouldn’t (not being in the same league and all that), and attempts to get overher disappointment by making repeated barbed witze at Dexter’s affluent background.

Thestory then takes a leap in time and we meet Emma and Dexter a year later, onthe same day. They have kept in touch. (They would, wouldn’t they? How wouldthe story progress, otherwise?) Dexter is in his gap year, travelling throughAsia, and Emma is touring with an experimental theatre company, having decidedto try out acting as her vocation, even though she is nagged all the time bythe suspicion that she does not have the requisite talent. Upon his return toEngland, Dexter embarks on what appears to be a successful media career as alate night television presenter of outré programmes, and, as was his ambition,sleeps his way through a cavalcade of women with nice legs and terrificbreasts. Emma, in the meanwhile, lurches from one soul-destroying job toanother, before becoming a teacher of English (the triple A’s came handy afterall) and drama in a secondary comprehensive in London. Both are inrelationships that, in the words of relationship counsellors, have seriousissues. Dexter is with his television co-presenter, a loud girl for whom‘bubbliness is a way of life verging on a disorder’, while Emma starts seeing aman who was a fellow-waiter when she worked in a Tex-Mex, and whose facereminds her of ‘tractors’. The man, Ian, has the ambition to become a stand-upcomedian and Emma simply does not have the heart to tell him that he isterrible at it. Emma and Dexter continue to meet dutifully, increasinglyfeeling that they have little left in common. Dexter, whose career is taking adownward trajectory—hastened by his willingness to snort cocaine by thegarden-hose and consume alcohol in quantities that would render a man ofaverage weight and height comatose—even if he does not know it, finds himselfgetting increasingly irked by Emma’s sardonic humour. He concludes that thechip on her shoulder—at not having achieved much in career despite triple A’sat university—has mutated into a millstone. Emma, on her part, sees what Dexterrefuses to accept what he has become: unpleasant, inconsiderate and on a fasttrain to endsville. Things come to a head between them during one of theirincreasingly cantankerous meetings, and Emma, unable to bear any longerDexter’s demeanour that suggests (to her) that he would rather be somewhereelse than be with her, walks away from their friendship. Neither has much luck in their relationships.The bubbly television presenter, on her way to the P list of celebrities,wisely concludes that Dexter, headed in the opposite direction, is past hissell-by-date and replaces him with an upgraded version. Emma finds escape fromIan’s awful jokes into the waiting arms of the principal of the comprehensiveshe works in (who seems so sexually fixated on her that you think he surelyqualifies as a stalker but for the fact that the stalkee has got into hisbed—metaphorically so to speak, they have sex in his office—of her own accord),and carries a two-year affair with him that is marked principally by lack ofaffection.

Overthe next few years, Emma and Dexter meet occasionally, mostly at the weddingreceptions of their university friends; and are cordial, civil and distant toeach other. Dexter starts another relationship; this time with a career womannamed Sylphie who talks and behaves like an agent of some alien species programmedto look and behave like humans; into the bargain she has awful petit bourgeoisparents who think Dexter is a waste of space. Dexter and Sylphie marry in due course and have a daughter. Dexteraccepts that his television career is more difficult to revive than arouseLazarus, and, heeding Sylphie’s sensible advice, gets a job offered by hisflatmate from his university days who has become some sort of business magnateand is opening sandwich bars all over the place. Emma too takes several decisions,each one the motivational gurus and Life-coaches would describe aslife-changing. She asks the unfunny Ian (to whom she in any case is notfaithful) to sod off; she tells the sex-fiend of a principal to find someoneelse he can get carpet burns with; and resigns her job in the school. Andbecomes a free-lance writer—writing teenage fiction, drawing her ownillustrations. After a lot of struggle and several rejections she finds apublisher and, to her pleasant surprise, her witty novel chronicling theadventures of her teenage heroine becomes successful, paving way—Harry Potterstyle—to several more installations. Things do not turn out that well forDexter. While he is sampling sandwiches for his university friend and employer,he (the employer) is sampling Sylphie’s buns. The marriage ends after Sylphiewalks out on Dexter, taking their daughter with her. Dexter is distraught andeven the knowledge that his ex-parents-in-law dislike Sylphie’s new partnereven more than they disliked him is not enough to console the inconsolablecuckold. Riper opportunity will not present itself to the two estranged friendsto reconcile, and that’s what happens. Emma and Dexter make up. They go a stepfurther and do something which Emma has thought about from time to time rightfrom their university days, but Dexter hasn’t until recently: they start arelationship. In the last part of the novel we find Emma and Dexter settlinginto a sedate, affectionate relationship—she writes her teenage best-sellerwhile he opens a café that is moderately successful. Surely nothing will gowrong for the two friends now. And then something unforeseen happens.

One Day is one of those novelsthat are absorbing, funny, sharply observed, wise, heart-warming, moving,and—for all these reasons—terrific reads. Starting in the Thatcher years, thenovel traces, via its two protagonists, the lives led by millions in the Labourboom years. Mind, there is not a lot of politics in the novel; in fact, despiteEmma’s intermittent hand-wringing at not being faithful to teenage socialist /left wing principles, there is hardly any. Similarly, despite an occasional nodto the flashbulb events such as the famous Labour victory of 1997 and the July2005 bombings of the London underground, the socio-politico-cultural events ofthese decades form, at most, a blurred background. It is therefore all the morestriking that the novel so succinctly captures the zeitgeist of those times. OneDay is a remarkable social novel.

Nichollstakes great care in developing the characters of the two protagonists. EmmaMorley and Dexter Mayhew are totally believable, solid, well roundedcharacters. They have their foibles and are capable of causing hurt; they arealso capable of genuine kindness. As the novel progresses, you find yourselfwarming up to them, getting engrossed in their lives, rejoicing in theirsuccess, and, when the end comes, they stay in your mind for a long time. Notmany novels can do this. Emma Morley, in particular, is a memorable character. OneDay is a deeply sentimental novel, but not once does Nicholls takerecourse to cloying sentimentality. It is a deeply affecting novel, withoutbeing schmaltzy. It is a rare gift toget the balance of emotions the exact right, and Nicholls manages it with greataplomb.

Theprose of One Day is fabulous. Nicholls writes like dream. The sentencesflow so smoothly that reading this novel is like floating lightly along thegentle flow of a river. As with everything else, the tone of the narrative ispitch perfect. The narrative engages you from the first page and your interestdoes not slag throughout its four hundred plus pages, which do not contain oneotiose word. There are passages of great wit in the novel, coupled with acuteobservations. One Day is a fine comic novel; it is a social comedy inaddition to everything else. The humour is wry but not cringeworthy. ThusNicholls’s description of the rituals of modern marriages brings a smile toyour face, but you also find yourself nodding because it rings so true.

One Day is wonderful (or wonderful, wonderful) novel (see the image below), andNicholls is a writer in the same tradition as Jonathan Coe and Nick Hornby: avirtuoso chronicler of how it is to live in modern Britain. Five stars.

Tintin in the Congo: Why would Anyone Read it?

2011-11-08T13:40:00.000-08:00

Maybe it isthe age thing, but I was never a fan of Tintin. I did not read Adventuresof Tintin when I was growing up.

By the timeTintinin the Congo, the most controversial of the Tintin comics was publishedin the UK, in 1991 (I think), I was no longer a child and did not feel anoverwhelming desire to read the comic. For the same reason I have not read anyof the Harry Potter books save one. I struggle to understand why adults ofaverage intelligence occupy themselves reading these novels aimed at children aged 10 to 14.I read one—Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—under duress a few years ago when mythen girl-friend, who was a great fan of these novels, refused tohave sex unless I read at least one novel in the series. She said that she wassick of listening to me slagging off Harry Potter without actually readingany of the novels. I pointed out that I wasn’t slagging off Harry Potter novels; Iwasn’t slagging of children who enjoyed the book-series; I certainlywasn’t slagging off J.K. Rowling, who, insofar as I was aware, had not claimed that her novels were classics which imparted knowledgeabout the human condition that made it worth everyone’s while to read them; Iwas specifically slagging off outwardly grown-up and mature adults who did notmind being spotted reading one of those books. She said whatever; she was stillnot going to have sex if I did not read at least one of the novels. I had to takeher view on board (she had competent breasts). I asked her which of the HarryPotter novels she would recommend and she suggested Prisoner of Azkaban,which, I was informed, was the darkest of the series. I read the novel and wasnot overwhelmed. It was competently written but I did not find it a captivatingread. I can’t remember what the plot was; but it does not matter—the themes areall the same in such novels. Harry and his mates get into sticky situationsthanks to the machinations of a devious villain and Harry unleashes somecrackerjack magic trick and saves the day. There is no real suspense: you knowHarry is always going to be victorious because he has special gifts. The storyis predictable and the prose, while adequate, is nothing great. Maybe you haveto have the mind of a pre-adolescent to enjoy these novels. I don’t have that mind (downside of being an adult),therefore I am unable to enjoy them. Having read one of the novels I have no desire to read the rest. Life is too short to read lame adventures of a boy wizard.

But back toTintin and his adventures.

StephenSpielberg has produced a movie entitled The Adventures of Tintin. I have of courseno intention of watching the film; however I googled the movie after reading about thebrouhaha about one of the adventure comics (more about it later), and found along entry on it in WikiPedia. I gave up reading the long plot- summary, whichwas tedious beyond endurance.

In theintroduction of the WikiPedia article it was mentioned that the movie was basedon three of the Tintin adventure comics. The list, unsurprisingly, does notinclude Tintin in the Congo. Very wise.

Thepublishers of Tintin comics have decidedto cash in on the world-wide release of the Spielberg film and have releasedthe comics as ‘collectors’ items’.

All thegraphic Tintin comics are in the children’s section except one: Tintinin the Congo.

Tintin in the Congo finds itself in the adult sectionalong with other adult graphic vampire novels. In addition the novels areshrink-wrapped with the following warning:

‘Inhis portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Hergé [Pen name of the Belgiancartoonist Georges Remi who created Tintin] reflects thecolonial attitudes of the time . . . he depicted the African people accordingto the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period — an interpretationthat some of today’s readers may find offensive.’

Not having read Tintin in the Congo (and not havingany intention to read it either) I have to depend on WikiPedia for the plot of Tintin in the Congo. I also read an article in the Guardian by the HumanRights lawyer David Enright, who, in 2007, successfully campaigned for thecomic to be removed from the Children’s Section to Adult Section.

The consensus seems to be that by today’sstandards the portrayal of Africans in the comic book is stereotypical, patronizingand racist. According to Enright’s article, there are pages after pages ofgraphic representations of black people looking like monkeys, bowing beforeTintin and telling each other that White man is very clever, worshipping Tintin’sdog Snowy as god etc. In the original (1931) edition there are descriptions ofspectacular cruelty (by today’s standards) to animals—exploding a rhinoceros fromwithin, killing apes and wearing their skins, stoning buffaloes etc.

It is argued by some that Tintin in the Congo isvery much the product of its times; it reflects the European attitudes of its times andshould be understood in this context.

So what were the European attitudes towardsthe people whom they had colonized?

Georges Remi (1907-1983)

In an interview he gave in the 1970s, Remi,the creator of Tintin, helpfully clarified the matter. Said Remi:

‘Forthe Congo as with Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the fact was thatI was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois society inwhich I moved… It was 1930. I only knew things about these countries thatpeople said at the time: 'Africans were great big children… Thank goodness forthem that we were there!' Etc. And I portrayed these Africans according to suchcriteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit whichexisted then in Belgium.’

So what was considered as standard normin the 1930s’ Belgium had become an embarrassment in the 1970s, and racist inthe 21^st century.

The fact is that Europeans by and large considered themselves to be a superior race until probably the first fiftyyears of the twentieth century and the attitudes depicted in Tintinin the Congo were, sadly, reflective of the beliefs of the widerEuropean society. Remi at least had the decency to feel embarrassed about it.

And Remi was not an exception. The viewsexpressed by Winston Churchill, Britain’s Imperialist, war-mongering prime-minister in the 1940s, towards people who were not White or Europeans would beconsidered, by today’s standards, shockingly racist.

In the 1940s when a man-made famine wasranging in India, Britain’s largest colony, in which almost 3 millions died ofstarvation, Churchill, as prime-minister of Britain (which had complete controlof and therefore responsibility for the continent), repeatedly stoppedships with food supplies going to India; the ships carrying cereals fromAustralia, for example, were not allowed to anchor in Bengal and went insteadto the Mediterranean where there already was abundant food supply. Let me makeit clear: it was not ineptness: Churchill deliberately, and in the fullknowledge that millions were dying of hunger, thwarted efforts of those whowanted to ease the miseries of Indian people. He was responsible for thedeaths of millions. By today’s standards it was a crime against humanity. (Although it is way beyond the scope of thispost, he was without doubt also a war criminal.) Why did he do it? Perhaps wecan find the explanation in a comment of his in which he declared that hehated Indians who were ‘beastly people with beastly religion [Hinduism]’ andthe ‘only people worse than the Indians were the Germans’. Churchill infamouslyderided Gandhi as a ‘half-naked fakir’ (which suggests that in addition tobeing a racist he was poor in mathematics) and indulged in despicablebehind-the-scene shenanigans that ensured that Gandhi did not win the NobelPeace Prize on the two occasions he was nominated for it. (Churchill wasawarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1950s for a body of work writtenby his assistants, which was a joke; by that time years of boozing had takenits toll and his alcohol-sodden brain was probably shrunken to the sizeof a dried apricot. If ever there was an undeserving winner of the Nobel Prizein Literature, it was this unscrupulous, unprincipled fat git.) Indianswere not the only ones towards whom Churchill was racist. In 1937 he commented: ‘Ido not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America orthe black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done tothese people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a moreworldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.’

No one in his right mind today would attempt to justify Churchill’sbehavior and comments described above. The best his apologists could come up with is thatthese comments and behavior ought to be seen in their context; that Churchillwas very much a man of his times. That is only partially true. Even in thosetimes there were those who felt that such behavior was unacceptable.Churchill, one can say, belonged to a particular brand of Europeans in whomignorance and arrogance combined to form the poisonous concoction of racism. (Gandhi,the ‘half-naked fakir’, on the other hand, was a man of altogether higher caliberthan the cigar-smoking fatso and held views that were, by any yardstick,emancipated.)

The semi-apologetic explanation Remi (a Nazi sympathizer, although recanted it later) came up with to explain thevile things written about the Africans in Tintin in the Congo is the kindestexplanation. Even in those times there were people, such as the great French writerRomain Rolland (the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, but sadly aforgotten name these days), who held views about humanity different from theprejudices the likes of Remi propagated through comics.

I can’t see why in this day and age anyone wouldwant to read anachronistic nonsensefrom the 1930s; it does not reflect the world we inhabit today. If I had achild living with me I would not want it to be exposed to such bilge. I wouldn’tsay Tintin in the Congo should be banned (I will never say that), but it is appropriate that thecomic book is removed from the children’s section in book-shops and comeswith a warning. Many will find its content offensive, and the warning will ensurethat parents will not inadvertently expose their children to this garbage.

Cricket Spot Fixing Scandal: Jailing of Cricketers is Stupid

2011-11-04T14:37:00.000-07:00

There was atime when I used to watch cricket avidly. That was years ago. Players likeVivian Richards, Sunil Gavaskar, Ian Botham, and Malcolm Marshall, while I wouldn’tgo so far as to say they were my heroes, were players I enjoyed watching.

Over theyears, however, I have gone off cricket. That is not because I wasdisillusioned with the stories of match-fixing scandals that started comingout, periodically, in the past ten years, usually (though not exclusively)involving players from the Indian subcontinent.

I went offcricket because, as I became long in the tooth, I simply couldn’t summon upenough concentration to watch a game which (in test match cricket) went on for fivedays and still ended without a result, and the shorter version went on for awhole day. I simply don’t have thestamina. (That does not however mean that I can cope with games which are of shorterduration, for example Football. I can’t understand what is there to enjoy in agame where aggressive men with attentional deficits run about for ninety minutes,ostensibly trying to kick a ball into the nets at the opposite ends of theground, but, really trying to kick opponents’ heads and testicle, trying to tripothers up, doing, in other words, whatever it is that men with impulse control issues can think of—ifthe erratic firing of their maldeveloped brain cells can be called thinking—to inflictgrievous body harm on one another. In the past I allowed myself, out of myinability to say No, to be kidnapped to some grotty pub, serving crap food andrough looking waitresses and clientele that, were they not busy shoutingobscenities at the plasma screen showing a game between, say, Arsenal andSpurs, would probably be lighting up matches with their farts for a ‘bit of alaugh’. But not now; life is too short to watch Football.)

The onlygame these days I can bring myself to watch is women’s tennis, preferably when Maria Sharapovaor Daniela Hantuchova is playing (and the camera is focusing on them frombehind as they bend down to receive the serve of their opponents).

Earlierthis year I watched the cricket world cup final with an Indian friend (who wasterribly excited about it, which was understandable, as India had reached thefinal). I just about managed that but found it hard-going.

I thereforehad not devoted my diminishing energies and concentration to the spot-fixingscandal involving a cricket match played between England and Pakistan last year.

Three Pakistanicricketers, one Butt and two Mohammads, fell foul of some ridiculous act that probablydoes not exist anywhere other than in Britain. One of the Mohammads accepted hisguilt while the other two, including Butt (who was the captain of the Pakistancricket team at the time) decided (unwisely, as it turned out) to contest thecharges.

Both were found guilty of charges—which, couched in convoluted legal gobbledegook,essentially were that these guys are cheats—by a majority verdict.

The judge—who,going by the sanctimonious sermon he delivered to the condemned men, seems likea pompous ass—gave the cricketers length jail sentences.

Somesanctimonious pompous asses in the cricketing media, however, think that thesentences were not harsh enough. For example, Simon Hughes—a third-rate countycricketer and a second-rate analyst / commentator. This guy played cricket inthe 1980s and was so shite that he was not considered good enough to play forEngland, which is saying something, as the English cricket team in the 1980swas so shite that practically every cricket-playing nation was wiping the floorwith us. After his mediocre, undistinguished career came to an undistinguished end Hughesbecame a journalist and commentator. To say Hughes talks crap would be insulting faeces. He frequently poses as a technical analyst and bores everyone intocatatonia by talking his head off about the position of the batter, the friction ofthe fabric of his trousers against his testicles, the angle of his bat, hisgrip on the handle of the bat, the distance between his hands and the surfaceof the bat, the wind velocity, the action of the bowler, the friction of thefabric of the trousers against his testicles, the condition of the ball, the timeof the day, the number of clouds in the sky—all of which conspire somehowto bring into effect whatever it is that Hughes has been asked to provide his expert commenton. It might be a wicket or it might be a boundary—it does not matter; he talksthe same shit. It is impossible to take him seriously. Hughes has now writtenan idiotic article, giving the readers the benefits of his wisdom, and has comeup with a five point plan (which will be discarded by Boy Scouts and which suggeststhat the man has the intelligence of a gnat) to ‘stamp out cheats’.

Thesentences are excessively harsh, unnecessary and stupid.

Let’s takethe sentence handed down to Butt. The disgraced skipper of the Pakistanicricket team has gone down for 30 months; however, if his behaviour is ‘good’he can come out after 15 months. He will then be on a license for the remaining15 months of his sentence during which he will be monitored. The other twocricketers who have received shorter sentences (but still way too long) willalso be out on license after serving half their sentences if they 'behave'.

None of the cricketers is a British citizen. Presumably they have no place to live in England, nomeans of subsistence, and no medical cover. All of these will have to beprovided to them when they come out. Who will foot the bill? Why, the Britishtax-payers. I fail to see why British tax-payers have to foot the bill forsomething which is not even considered a crime in many countries. (On adifferent tack, this was also the argument, I remember reading, of JulianAssange the boss of WikiLeaks (which, rumour has it, is about to go bust due tolack of funds. The legal definition of statutory rape in the UK is apparentlydifferent from that in the Scandinavian countries).

Mind you, Iam not blaming the poor Pakistani sods for this. I am pretty sure they did notwant to be in this position. They did not come willingly to the UK to stand thetrial; they were forced to come here and stand trial.

And whatwas their ‘crime’? They took money and Butt, the captain, instructed the twobowlers to bowl a no-ball each. When a bowler bowls a no-ball the side that isbatting is awarded one run. What the trio were accused (and found guilty) ofwas therefore ‘spot-fixing’ and not ‘match-fixing’.

They wereinvestigated by the cricket’s governing body and were handed out bans ofbetween five to ten years. That shouldhave been enough. There are those who are now criticising the InternationalCricket Control (ICC) of being too lenient and are demanding that thecricketers be banned for life. The camel-faced captain of the Englishcricked team, Andrew Strauss , has weighed in and described the ICC as toothlesstiger. Strauss would do well to reduce his waist-line and score runs againstquality oppositions instead of adding more hot air to environment.

Those demanding harsher punishment by the ICC arewrong. A life-ban would not have been justified in this case. There is noevidence that the actions of the cricketers adversely influenced the outcome ofthe match (which, I guess, would be more difficult to arrange in any case, asit would require involvement of several players in the team). There is not even evidence to suggest that their actions accorded significant advantage (or disadvantage) to their team or the English team. After all how much difference a single run can make? This is not tosay that the cricketers did not do wrong. However, the punishment meted outmust be proportional to the wrongdoing. And a life-ban forspot-fixing is way too excessive.

Similarlythe argument that the time-limited bans should be converted to life-bans simplybecause they have been found guilty in a criminal court in a country and sentto jail is a straw man. The criminal court did not hear any evidence that wasnot available to the ICC. The three cricketers had to stand trial because their cheating is consideredas criminal as per an act which came into existence in England in 2005. Insome other country this type of cheating—because that’s what it is at the endof the day, no different, some might argue, from an athlete or a swimmer whotakes banned performance enhancing drugs and deliberately changes the outcomeof a competition in his or her favour; and they are not prosecuted—would nothave been considered a criminal act. Why, even in our country, before 2005, itwould not have been considered a criminal act.

And thesentences are totally disproportionate to the crime the cricketers have been found guilty of. This is acountry where MP’s who were systematically defrauding the tax-payers for thousands of pounds for years were given jail sentences of only a few months.An old friend of mine used to work as a care-assistant in a hostel for homelesspeople, some or more of whom, he used to tell me, were pretty nasty pieces of work—persistentand prolific offenders with lists of criminal activities longer than M1. Fortheir 15^th GBH they would be sent to prison for 12 months, wouldcome out on license after 6 and would be recalled for one night in prison afterthey had breached conditions of their license 5 times, and released out againso that they could get on with their daily routine of drug dealing and othernefarious activities. I did not see any of the cheating bankers in the City ofLondon go to jail for their greed. But we have seen it fit to condemn three cricketers, some from impoverished backgrounds, to lengthyprison sentences.

Butt (thatis an unfortunate name given the circumstances in which he now finds himself),Asif and Amir are most definitely cheats. Prosecuting them was way over the top. Their prosecution was waste of British tax payers' money and theirconviction makes no sense.

Book of the Month: Call It Sleep (Henry Roth)

2011-11-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

Henry Roth was 28 when he wrote Call It Sleep. He did not publish another novel for sixty years.

The novel depicts the Jewish immigrant lifefrom the eyes of a very young boy before the outbreak of the First World War,in the slums of the Lower East side, New York, an area densely populated byimpoverished, semiliterate immigrants who led hand to mouth existence by doingmanual labours. But the novel is a lot more than just a chronicle of the LowerEast Side’s squalor. As Alfred Kazin observed, it interweaves a number oftaboos—religious, sexual, cellar and gutter—that makes it a work of great art.

The protagonist of the novel is a youngboy—David Schearl, who lives with his mother, Genya, and father, Albert. Albertis a bitter, unhappy man of violent temper, who is prone to read hiddendemeaning messages and take offence at the innocuous remarks and gestures of others,where none is intended. ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in theireyes!’ he complains. ‘How much can a man endure?’ The reasons behind Albert’srancour, which borders on misanthropy, are never fully explained till almostthe end of the novel, and even then the reader is left with the feeling thatthe explanation is only a part of the jigsaw. David, whom Albert seems to hatewith a passion—the explanation comes only towards the end—, bears the brunt ofhis father’s ugly temper. Albert has shades of the violent father in D.H.Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. The little boy is passionately loved andfiercely protected by his mother. The shy, introverted little boy has fewfriends. He is frequently bullied by urchins in his neighbourhood, and issolely and intensely dependent on his mother for meaningful human contact aswell as inner growth. The relationship amongst the three individuals in thisunhappy household is very Freudian: the son seems to have replaced the fatherin his mother’s affection; the father is excluded, or has excluded himself,from the close bond the mother and son share. Having realised that he hasbecome emotionally otiose the father can only make his presence felt by violentdisplays of his temper. The newly immigrant family is striking it out in the‘Golden Land’, uneasily, not least because of Albert’s inability to stick itout with jobs he dislikes.

The novel is divided into four sections.The first section, appropriately titled ‘The Cellar’, deals with the darkerelements of life—aggressive and sexual. There is, in fact, a palpable sexualtension—one of its many strands—throughout the novel. David observes early thathis mother is attractive to a ‘fellow countryman’ of his father who visits thehousehold regularly, at Albert’s behest—Albert suspects nothing—, to havedinners with them, and, on one occasion, when Albert has gone out, makes asexual proposition to Genya. David is filled with an impotent rage: hedesperately wants to ask Lutar, the acquaintance, to get out, wants tophysically harm him, but can do nothing other than go with his mother to theirupstairs-neighbours in order to avoid meeting him, where the neighbours’crippled daughter, a few years older than David, drags him to a closet and‘plays bad’. David knows that he has crossed some awful threshold and is filledwith self-loathing and disgust, which is compounded because he cannot confidein his mother. ‘She didn’t know as he knew how the whole world could break intomillion little pieces. . .’

In the fourth and last section, ‘The Rail’,David enters the house when his mother has just finished taking a bath andopens the door for him wearing just a bathrobe, which, he notices, is clung toher breasts and thighs. Later, down on the streets he hears some boys in thestreet bragging about how they spied on a woman taking bath, describing ingraphic details what they saw—‘big tids stickin’ oud in frund . . .Big bushunder duh belly . . .Fat ass . . .’—and realises that it is his mother they aretalking about. ‘The rush of shame set his cheeks and ears blazing like flamebefore a bellows, drove blood like a plunger against the roof of his skull. Hestood with feet mortised to the spot, knees sagging, quivering.’ Later, in thesame section, David becomes friendly with a Polish Christen boy, Leo, andallows himself to lead him (Leo) to the house of his aunt where he (Leo) ‘playsbad’ with David’s step-cousin, Esther, in the cellar while he, David, ‘layschickee’ (be a lookout). It is this transgression, together with the religiousone—leading a goy into a Jewish household—that leads to the novel’s violentclimax.

There are those who think that at its heartCallIt Sleep is a religious work. The third of the book’s four section iscalled ‘The Coal’, a reference to a passage from Issaih, which describes thepurifying touch of the fire, brought by the angels, to the prophet’s lips, andwhich David first hears in the ‘Cheder’, the Hebrew school he attends to learnthe ‘God’s language’. The passage makes a deep impression on the young boy’smind, and he becomes preoccupied with finding a similar spark of light in hisown life—his admiration for Leo is best understood in this context. Thisobsession eventually, in the violent dénouement of the novel, nearlycosts him his life.

The novel also vividly depicts, withoutdescending into hysteria, the immigrant Jewish community’s anxieties aboutbeing engulfed by the all-pervasive Christianity around them. David becomesutterly fascinated by the rosary-beads which he sees in his ‘friend’ Leo’shouse, and it is in receipt of this rosary that he agrees not only to lead Leoto his step-cousin’s house knowing fully well what Leo is intending to do.David is also aware that his mother, years ago, when living in the ‘OldCountry’, had been infatuated with a Gentile, a church organist, and haddisgraced the family. She had married Albert even though he is not ‘suitable’.Albert has a secret of his own, told to Genya by his mother, although he is notaware of it. Following the incident at his step-cousin’s house when they are‘found out’ by his other step-cousin, in the ‘Cheder’, in what can only bedescribed as a breathtaking leap of imagination, he tells the old Rabbi that heis only half-Jewish, an off-spring of a liaison between his mother and achurch-organist, a goy; that his mother is really his aunt and his real motherhad died when he was very young. The old Rabbi promptly visits the house toimpart this information, which confirms his father’s worst suspicions, pavingway to the climax of the novel.

A less recognized, certainly less commentedupon, attribute of Call it Sleep is its humour. The novel is suffused with blackhumour, at its most prominent in those portions featuring the fat, irascible,ill-smelling rabbi, Yiddel (‘Little Jew’ in Yiddish), on whom Roth pours hisfull scorn. The descriptions of the goings-on in the ‘Cheder’ are veryDickensenian in their tone. Then there is Bertha, David’s, foul-mouthed youngeraunt, who appears in the second section of the book (The Picture). Bertha, alarger than life character, is not afraid to call spade a spade and can holdher own against Albert (who hates her almost as much as he hates his own son).Bertha offers some light relief in this intense and pensive novel, and it iseasy to warm up to her. Perhaps because of Bertha’s presence this section ofthe book is the least broody and gloomy.

Call It Sleep is alsoremarkable for the innovative use of language. It functions at two levels andcan be called multilingual, though it isn’t, really. Exclusively set in theYiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant quarter of New York, almost all thecharacters in the novel speak terrible English and are fluent in Yiddish. Roth,the omnipresent, unseen narrator, lets it be known that the English they speakat home is in fact translation of the Yiddish. This ‘English’, in contrast tothe guttural, savage English they speak outside, for example while speaking tostrangers, is splendid, almost too splendid. As Alfred Kazin observed, English,in fact, is the foreign language in this novel which is set in New York! Rothseems to have used this device to depict, almost exaggerate, the sense ofterrible alienation experienced by the immigrant community; the language itselftouches universal themes that transcend time.

Call it Sleep is, likeall of Henry Roth’s novels, autobiographical. First published in 1934, atthe height of the Great Depression, Call It Sleep was appreciated by critics. It was out of print for several years and its author, nursing the longest writer's block in the history of twentieth century literature, disappeared from public view. Itwas reissued in the 1960s. With the reissue (and critical reappraisals) thenovel (and its author) made a comeback and the novel, since, has sold millionsof copies (although Roth would not publish another novel for thirty moreyearsTowards the end of his life, after a silence that lasted six decades, Roth published four volumes of autobiographical novels under the title Mercy of a Rude Stream. The first two volumes were published in Roth's life time while the last two were published posthumously. In it Roth follows the young boy into adolescence and early adulthood, except that he is called Ira Stigman. Last year, full fifteen years after he died came out the last Roth novel, An American Type, which takes over from where Mercy finishes and traces the life of Ira Stigman, Roth's literary alter-ego, into Depression-era America.)

Call it Sleep is manynovels in one. It is a moving chronicle of the now disappeared world of theYiddish speaking Jewish immigrant community in America in the first years ofthe twentieth century; it is also a compelling chronicle of the lives of theAmerican poor; the fervidly introspective narrative has subterranean Freudian influences; and itsstrange and lyrical language will hold you in its thrall from beginning to end.

Call it Sleep is amodernist classic of the twentieth century, one of those novels you must read before youdie.

Death of Muammar Gaddafi: the Curse of Oil

2011-10-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

MuammarGaddafi is gone. He is not just history; he is biology and chemistry. The longest ruling non-royal in the history of modern worldwas dragged out of the drain pipe in which he was hiding (after the convoy inwhich he was travelling was bombed bythe NATO forces) by the rebel forces which pursued his convoy out ofSirte, Gaddafi’s home town where he was holing out for the past few weeks. The formerdictator who was crowned in 2008 as the king of kings was then murdered with abullet in his head; he was also shot in the chest and abdomen. His body wasthen dragged through the streets by the forces which are calling themselvesliberators of Libiya and promising a new dawn, and which are supported by anumber of European nations, notably France and Britain.

TheRussians are not happy about this. They have believed for a while that theywere duped by the mendacious European nations into not vetoing the action inLibya. They also believe that NATO forces clearly exceeded the UN mandate whichwas to ensure that civilians be protected. The Russian spokesman has formallyaccused the NATO forces of acting illegally when they bombed the convoytravelling out of Sirte as no civilians were demonstrably at risk of harm.

The Russians have a point (which they perhaps feel they need to make as countries like Britain have availed themselves of the opportunities in recent times to teach the Russians lessons in morality). Needless tosay, though, that these concerns will not be answered by the European nations. Whichwill be par for the course seeing as one of the European countries meddlinginto Libyan strife, Britain, even before the UN mandate,tried to smuggle weapons, false passports and currency into thatcountry. (When the ‘mission’ was intercepted, the ridiculous William Hague hadthe gall to make the ridiculous claim that it was a diplomatic mission.)

On the dayof what was essentially an extra-judicial killing of Gaddafi by the ‘liberationforces’ which some of the European countries (e.g. France) hastened to declareas the legitimate government even as the civil war was raging in that country,I watched on Question Time smirking politicians across parties lining up tomake trumphalist jingoistic noises (‘A bad man has come to a bad end and weare proud of our role in his downfall’ etc.)

The sameday came the spectacularly distasteful advice from the BritishDefence Secretary, Philip Hammond, to the British firms that they pack theirsuitcases and head for Libya to secure contracts. These guys really have noshame or decency. Every time they open their gobs it is to say vile things which offend senses and intelligence.

Theidiots in the previous Labour government fondly thought that Britain wouldsecure contracts to rebuild Iraq after she had played a major role indestroying that country. Leaving aside the questionable morale of this, thatdid not even happen. The contracts were grabbed by the Americans and Chinese(and the brave Americans who had no stomach for sending their civilians intowhat had become an extremely dangerous region, subcontracted Indians in Iraq asalso in Afghanistan.)

If what isreported in British media has any truth in it, the death of Gaddafi isgenerally met with great fanfare and joy and happiness in Libya.

As you watched barely adolescent boys roaming on the streets of Tripoli in frenzy,totting AK 47 and firing into the skiesas if they were bursting crackers, you wondered whether this was the same citywhich, in a different era and different times, was renowned for its libraries and books. It is notedthat the Libyan king in the 13^th century, when he defeated Christianhordes, demanded books rather than material wealth from the defeated nations.

It is all verysad: a country that once was a beaconof civilization has sunk to a level where a dead ruler’s body is draggedthrough the streets and his death is celebrated in a manner that would make anycivilized person hang his head in shame.

If we lookat the more recent history, Libya was a part of the mighty Ottoman empire up tothe nineteenth century, despite its periodic attempts to be free of its fetters. In thesecond half of the 19^th century, the rapacious Europeans, inparticular Italy and France (in case of Libya), looking to loot the region andfleece it off its wealth, did what other European nations (like Britain andHolland) had done in other parts of the world. With scant regard for theopinions and wishes of the people the European powers divided the region amongst themselves bysigning treaties (as if that made it alright). Italy controlled Tripoli andCyrenaica. The rest of the region was divided amongst other European vultureslike Britain and France. In the 1910s there was even a minor war between Italy andthe declining Ottoman Empire (Turkey) over this region. Interestingly, if one reads some of the accounts ofthat war, one finds out that the war that had begun between Italy and Turkey,ended with Italians fighting and killing Tripolians.

During theFirst World War, which was essentially a European war, different parts of whata few decades later would become Libya fought against each other, not becausethey had any animus amongst themselves but because the European nationscontrolling the regions were fighting against each other.

There is nodearth of jingoistic British ‘historical books’ giving accounts of the warbetween General Rommel and the British 8^th division during thesecond world war. Suffice it to say that, like the First World War, this wasessentially a European conflict in which this part of Africa got involved only becauseit was controlled by European powers. (The British forced tens of thousands ofIndians (who died needlessly) to fight in the Second World War even though the Indians had nothing todo with the shenanigans in Europe; indeed they had come to hate the British rule somuch that they wanted the British to get out.)

When theSecond World War ended it was Britain who controlled Tripoli and Cyrenaica while theFrench controlled Fezzan.

Eventually,in 1951, Libya as we know it today came into existence. Landlocked on all sidessave one, Libya is an African country that also has links (religious) withArabia.

King Idrisbecame the ruler of the newly created country which was not on the radar of theEuropean countries or the newly emerging superpower, America.

That allchanged in 1959. Oil was discovered in Libya. Suddenly America developed aninterest in the region. America had already twisted arms of the Saudi King(Mohammad Bin Ibd Saud) to sign a 60-year treaty (the battle ships sent by Rooseveltto the Suez canal went a long waytowards the Saudi King swiftly making up his mind) wholly favourable toAmerica, and now similar tactics were used in Libya.

It may oversimplification, but the Western powers essentially took unfair advantage of these relatively less developed regions of the world, and exploited them. Therulers of these countries had no agenda beyond accumulating personal wealthand self-aggrandizement and were bought. In return the regions became legally andofficially open to the multinationals to dig for oil. This is what happened inLibya.

This wasalso a period marked by Arab nationalism. Gamal Abdel Nasser with his anti-AmericanArab nationalism inspired many in the region. He became the idol for many inthe region. One of them was Muammar Gaddafi, who came to the conclusion that theonly way to stop the looting of his country by the Western Powers which KingIdris was allowing was to remove Idris from the power.

On 1 September1969 Gaddafi engineered a bloodless coup and Idris was removed. Thus began theregin of Gaddafi that would last for 42 years and end with bloodbath anddestruction of the country. Along the way Gaddafi, who wanted to stop thewealth of his country being siphoned off, himself became corrupted by theabsolute power he came to yield over his vast country.

ThatGaddafi became a tyrant and began abusing human rights in his country is without a doubt. It is also beyond doubt that the Western powers became very concerned about it only after Gaddafi becametoo big for his boots and started creating obstacles in Western multinationals' plans to dig oil from Libya and generate profits of billions of dollars. One wonders whether America would have been so concerned about Gaddafi’s abysmal human rights record if he had not (as ifon a whim and without any warning) nationalised the American companies inLibya in the 1980s.

UntilGaddafi was favouring the Western oil companies nobody cared what he did inLibya. Gaddafi’s grandiloquent plans in the region (remember his quest to uniteLibya and Egypt in order to combine the oil-wealth of Libya and the populationand skills of Egypt?), his pan-Arab ambitions, and his economic alternatives tothe Capitalist and Communist systems (he turned Libya, officially, into theGreat Jamahiriyah, which meant State of the Masses; he expounded in his ‘GreenBook’ how formation of committees everywhere would supplant the need of anyform of government; and in his second volume dedicated to solving ‘economicproblems’ he envisaged a society thatbanished the profit motive and made money redundant) made many wonderwhether the Libyan ruler’s connection with reality was becoming faulty.

It wasnever going to work. Gaddafi’s pan-Arab ambitions were frustrated; Egypt whichwas an ally became a vicious enemy that fought a border war. Gaddafi now turnedto more and more propaganda and openly started supporting what he described as ‘revolutionaryoutfits’ and the West described as terrorist organizations. He became America’spublic enemy number one when he rejected American sponsored peace process in theregion.

It wasaround this time that Ronald Reagan, a second rate actor of B grade Hollywoodmovies, who had become America’s president (and was probably showing earlysigns of senility) described Gaddafi as ‘the mad dog of Africa’ (very classy).From this point onwards an image of Gaddafi as an unhinged, slightly buffoonish, but nevertheless sinister, villain took roots in the psych of many in the West (reinforced by images of Gaddafi's near-zombified face).

I heard the (equally buffoonish) BBC presenter John Simpson (who has the knack makinghimself the hero, somehow, of any conflict he is covering) on BBC Radio 4. Simpson who interviewedGaddafi on many occasions said that in his view Gaddafi wastotally barking. He (Gaddafi) was apparently on so many pills towards the end (according to Simpson) that it took him half an hour to take them all. (This seemslike a typical Simpson exaggeration.) I read in the Guardian that a ‘soldier’ ofthe rebel forces which captured Gaddafi and killed him said that in his lastmoments Gaddafi was ‘blabbering like an idiot.’ Apparently Gaddafi wasrepeatedly saying, ‘What is going on? Where am I? What have I done?’ The ‘soldier’said they could not believe this was the same man who had ruled Libya for 42years.

It is also true that towards the end Gaddafi's public utterances became increasingly erratic, and it was difficult to make up one's mind whether he was being sarcastic or just incoherent. In his 2009speech to the United Nations, Gaddafi accused the UN for failing to prevent atotal of 65 wars; he demanded that Security Council had too much power andshould be abolished (some sense in that; why are countries like France andBritain still permanent members of the security council? It does not reflectthe changing power equation in the world);and also demanded that European powers pay their former colonies 7.7 trilliondollars in compensation or else face massimmigration. (He had a point, although how he had arrived at the figure of $7.7 trillion was not clear.)

Gaddafi is frequently accused in the West of sponsoringterrorist acts (e.g. Lockerby bombing). According to WikiPedia, as early as1969 British Special Air Force was planning to assassinate Gaddafi in anoperation dubbed ‘Hilton Assignment’, but the plan was called off at the lastminute because United States (Britain was America’s lackey even then) pulledthe plug, deciding that Gaddafi was ant-Communist and therefore acceptable.The dement Reagan famously bombed Gaddafi’s compound in 1986 in thefull knowledge that several civilians would be killed along with Gaddafi (Gaddafi survived, having left the compound shortly before the bombing, after being tipped, but his adopted daughter was killed.). Arenegade British Intelligence officer (who was hounded out of Britain) claimed that MI6 had assigned hundreds ofthousands of pounds in the 1990s to assassinate Gaddafi. All these assassinationplots were hatched in countries which claim to be civilised and democratic. Thesecret services and air forces and armies are ultimately accountable topoliticians. If Gaddafi was a terrorist for the activities of individuals inLibyan intelligence (as in Lockerby bombing) what do these failed assassinationattempts on Gaddafi make the Western politicians who must have known about (andin all probabilities authorized) them? Murderers? Terrorists?

The ironyof course is that Gaddafi (like Saddam Hussain in Iraq) was also hated by Islamicextremists as well and a few of the attempts on his life were carried out byIslamic extremist organizations.

Ultimatelyit comes down to oil. If Libya did not have oil nobody would have cared what went on in that country. (Do any of the countries, always eager to invade oil-rich nations care about what is going on in Burma or Zimbabwe?)Libya alone is pouring millions of barrels of oil every day into the world; the oil is of suchquality that not a great of expenditure is needed to purify it. If Gaddafi hadbeen content in remaining the poodle of the Western powers and allowed theWestern multinationals to dig oil and make profits worth billions of dollars, noone would have cared what he got up to in his desert country.

It is thecurse of oil.

Julian Barnes Wins the Booker

2011-10-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

I am verypleased that Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers, has won this year’s Booker. He was the only oneamongst the short-listed whom I had read, and one of only two I had heard ofbefore the short-list was announced (the other being Carol Birch).

I alwaysfeel somewhat cheated when the Booker short-list is announced, as most of theshort-listed novels have come out only in hard-back editions which I don’t buy(can’t afford and no space to keep them). The occasional novel which isavailable in paperback is usually by a less well-known author and I think tomyself that I’d buy the novel only if it wins the Booker (it usually doesn’t).

It is not aproblem per se. There are so many books which I’d like to read but haven’t thatwaiting for several months—as in case of The Finkler’s Question, lastyear’s Booker winner, which I read this year, after it came out inpaperback—for the papaerback edition to come out is not a catastrophe. I am apatient person.

At 150pages, The Sense of an Ending is a slight book (by volume); but thereare occasions when slim novels have won the award, for example, PenelopeFitzgerald’s Offshore which may well be the shortest novel to win the Booker(not her best, though) and Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam (weak story with flawedending).

It wasfourth time lucky for Julian Barnes in 2011. For the third time in a row theBooker has been awarded to an established British writer, and,like Hilary Mantel (2009 winner) and Howard Jacobson (2010 winner) before him,Barnes is a worthy winner. (I hope thenext year’s Booker judges will take note of this trend; Martin Amis’s new novelis coming out next year.)

Below arefive of my favourite Julian Barnes books.

Flaubert’s Parrot

Publishedin 1984, this was Barnes's first novel to be shortlisted for the Booker. This is oneof my favourite novels. Its Flaubert obsessed narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite,is tracking down a stuffed parrot that once sat atop the writing desk of thegreat French novelist. Flaubert’sParrot is not a tightly plotted novel in that there are many chapterswhere Braithwaite (who strikes you as an amusing pedant) pontificates onFlaubert’s life that has no direct relation to the quest of the stuffed parrot.Braithwaite has an animus against literary critics whom he dismisses asprofessional misinterpreters; yet he remains unaware that what he is doing isliterary criticism. I do not think that Flaubert’s Parrot is a post-modernnovel, but it certainly has metafictional elements. The fictional element isBraithwaite’s quest for the eponymous parrot, but Barnes uses Flaubert’s lifeas a springboard to launch into a treatise on art and reality that is embeddedwithin the novel. It is a clever novel, without being self-conscious about it (unlike many of Iris Murdoch’s novels, which I don’t find clever at all despite their pretensions) and carries its intellectual weight, as itwere, effortlessly.

Talking It Over

This novelcame out in 1991. It is a black comedy involving a love triangle involving, aslove triangles do, two men and a woman. The novel is painstakingly schematisedand the shifting angles of the love triangles are very deliberate; but thestory is told with great brio and it sucks you in. The novel bursts with wittyremarks and observations. I think I first came across the term nicklef**ker inthis novel: it describe a person who is reluctant to spend money.

Love etc.

This novelcame out in 2001 and tells the story of Stuart, Oliver and Gillian whom wefirst meet in Talking It Over ten years on. You can call it a sequel. I readthe two books in the reverse order. Barnes’s essayist inclinations (veryevident in Flaubert’s Parrot) are reined in here, and the novel is muchdarker, sourer, than Talking It Over. The psychologicalevolutions of its characters (i.e. if you have read the two books in the orderin which they came out, and in quick succession, so that you remembered thefirst novel) is a bit shaky; but the novel is like a breeze, and even funnierthan its predecessor.

Arthur and George

This novelhas some superficial similarities to Flaubert’s Parrot, but is verydifferent in many other respects. Like Flaubert’s Parrot, the novel has areal-life person at its centre: Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of SherlockHolmes (the Arthur in the title). However (unlike Flaubert’s Parrot) therewas no metafictional element. Barnes employs historical realism as he tells thestory—without any deviation from the plot and does not meander into post-modernnarrative—of a relatively less known episode in the life of the great writerwhen he took up cudgels on behalf of George Edalji (the George in the title)and successfully reversed a miscarriage of justice. The novel suffered at times(especially in the second half) from information overload about EdwardianEngland, but on the whole it worked for me. Arthur and George wasshortlisted for the Booker in 2005, but lost out to John Banville’s The Sea, which I have reviewed on this blog.

Nothing to be Frightened of

This is theonly non-fiction book of Barnes, his musing on mortality, I have read. I read it last year and enjoyed ita lot. I have reviewed it on this blog.

I shallread The Sense of an Ending—I’d have read it even if it hadn’t won the Booker.Will I read any of the other short-listed novels? Two seem interesting. A.D.Miller’s Snowdrops which is publicised as a riveting psychological dramathat unfolds over the course of one Moscow winter’. I heard A.D. Miller(Snowdrops is his first novel) speak about it on Radio 4 last week. Snowdropsapparently is English translation of the Russian slang for corpses buried undersnow. From what I heard, Snowdrops probably does not project the Russiansociety in favourable light. The other novel that seems interesting is Canadianauthor Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues which is aboutblack Jazz musicians in Berlin at the outbreak of the Second World War. Thatsounds promising. (The poor lady came all the way from the Canadian Prairie,with her eight-weeks-old child for the award ceremony, only to be disappointed.Surely she deserves a consolation prize of some sort for her efforts.)

I do notexpect The Sense of an Ending to come out before next year. While I wait for the the paperback edition to come out I shall read England England, thethird of Barnes’s novels to have been short-listed for the Booker (before he won it with his fourth) and which Ihave in my collection for a while but haven’t got round to read it.

Book of the Month: Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)

2011-10-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Last year Iheard Jonathan Franzen in a literary programme being asked what he thought ofthe literary courses purporting to teach would-be fiction writers the tricks ofthe trade. Franzen heaved a deep sigh (which would have been heard at the backof the auditorium even without the microphone), his body posture suggestingthis precisely was the sort of dross he was afraid he would be asked. Hisanswer was surprisingly sincere and unironic. He said that the literary courseswould not make a writer of you if you did not have the requisite talent;however they could teach you the technical aspects of novel writing which youwould otherwise take a long time—as he did—to learn. He concluded by sayingthat he did not enrol in any literary course but taught regularly in several.

Franzen wason a promotion tour of Freedom which was published with atempest of media hype not seen since Ayatollah Khomeini took out a fatwaagainst Salman Rushdie after the publication of Satanic Verses. Theinterviewer was fawning over Franzen in a manner that was disrespectful to herage, receiving every utterance of the writer as if he was revealing the secret formula for the elixir of life.

Franzenthen read out an extract from Freedom. If I remember correctly itwas about a telephonic dialogue between someone called Joey and a woman namedCarol. Joey used to go out with Carol’s daughter but had not called her sincehe went to university and Carol was (rightly) thinking that he was planning toditch her daughter and was unhappy about it. I did not find the extractparticularly riveting but that could have been down to Franzen’s peculiarlyleaden and monotonous style of reading aloud.

Franzen’s2001 novel, The Corrections, catapulted him to the position of a literary star.Accolades were showered on him like confetti by the critics; the novel won theNational Book Award for that year (though not the Pulitzer), and was aninternational best seller.

I read Correctionsduring summer holidays a few years ago, and while I liked the novel a lot Iwasn’t sure that it was the greatest novel I had read.

Freedom is Franzen’s first work of fictionafter a long hiatus of nine years since Corrections was published. This timeround the media frenzy was even more. (The word ‘frenzy’ should be interpretedadvisedly. The frenzy surrounding the publication of a literary novel is not tobe mistaken for the frenzy outside White Hart Lane when Spurs play Arsenal inPremiership Football; no one gets hurt. A few gushing Interviews in the culturesections of broadsheets and ‘lively discussions’ on book blogs qualify, in myview, for literary frenzy. To be fair Franzen’s mug did appear on the frontcover of the Time magazine, the first novelist to do so in ten years sinceStephen King; and that’s supposed to be a big deal.)

I read Freedomafter it came out in paperback, thinking, as I started reading the novel, letme see what the fuss is about. In my experience the ‘long awaited’ follow-upsto literary masterpieces rarely live up to expectations. Donna Tartt’s début novel, The Secret History, was sensational. She followed it, more than adecade later, by The Little Friend, which was a damp squib.

I wastherefore not sure that I was going to like Freedom; but tell youwhat, I loved it; I loved it more than The corrections.

In FreedomFranzen tells the story of a middle-class Midwestern couple—Walter and PattyBerglund—, their two children Joey and Jessica, and their friend Richard Katz.These are the main characters. There is a raft of secondary, peripheral,characters that enrich this magnificent novel.

The novelis divided into several sections. In the opening section Franzen introduces thereader to Walter and Patty, the baby-boomers who once lived in St Paul,Minnesota, a run-down district before it was gentrified by the likes of Walterand Patty. The novel opens with theomnipresent narrator (whose presence is felt in all sections save those whichare memoirs of Patty Berglund, entitled ‘Mistakes were Made’) informing thereader that Walter, who now lives in Washington D.C., has made a mess of hisprofessional life by getting embroiled in projects of dubious ethicality. Theminor notoriety Walter has attracted, the reader is informed, is in starkcontrast to the liberal, left-of-the-centre views the neighbours of theBerglunds in St Paul associated him with.

Thepanoramic introduction gives the readers some idea as to the direction thenovel will take. In the subsequent sections the reader is treated to a grandtour, via various detours in the marriage of Walter and Patty, and lives ofother protagonists, the state of health of American society, including but notlimited to (as I understood it) the slow yet steady decline of liberalism. Itis also a compassionate commentary on the struggles and foibles of thedeveloped-world middle classes. At the heart of the story is the family ofWalter and Patty Berglund; Freedom is a family saga. BothWalter and Patty have their baggages to carry. Patty is the eldest child of aNew York Jewish mother with left-leaning political views and ambitions, and an‘exceedingly gentile’ father who is a barrister. Patty, who had a potentialcareer as a basketball player—never encouraged by her parents—that was thwartedby an injury, wants to put as much distance—physical, emotional andcognitive—between herself and her mother. Her ambition is to be a goodhousewife and mother. Walter, a third generation Swede, is the middle child ofhis parents, and has spent his whole childhood disliking his alcoholic fatherand sociopathic brothers. He too wants to lead a life different from hisparents. Walter and Patty meet first in college and Patty is secretly attractedto Walter’s best friend and roommate Richard Katz (a colonel Gaddafilook-alike), another product of a dysfunctional family, who has musicalambitions. Richard whose friendship with Walter—as Walter acknowledges at onepoint—is characterized by brinkmanship covets Patty, but it is the slow and steadyWalter whom Patty marries and settles into what she hopes to be a life-time ofmarital bliss. In due course they have two children—Jessica and Joey. Pattycomes to have such intense relationship with Joey that his only way not to besuffocated by the possessive love of his mother is to rebel in a mannercalculated to enrage his parents. Joey starts a relationship with the next doorneighbour’s daughter who Patty thinks is ‘totally unsuitable’ for her son, notleast because of the difference in the social status of the two families.Walter, a devoted conservationist, gets entangled in morally questionableschemes of a multi-billionaire coal baron (with close links to Neo-cons) who isapparently obsessed with creating a protected habitat of the rapidly decliningsongbird, which necessitates shady dealings with other multinationals andinvolve blowing off mountain tops. Walter, hired by the coal baron atdizzying salary, convinces himself that what he is doing isgoing to be of benefit in the long run even though it may make him look like aconscienceless hypocrite in the short run. Walter is ably assisted inmaintaining this mirage by his attractive Indian assistant Lalitha. Lalitha,engaged to an Indian neurosurgeon, has clearly fallen for her boss; and Walterwhose marriage to Patty, who is sinking deep into middle-age depression andproblem drinking, is floundering, is also attracted to Lalitha; however he isnot going to be waylaid into an affair because of his notions of fidelity tohis spouse. What Walter and Patty definitely do not need is trouble that wouldjeopardize their relationship further. The trouble arrives in the form ofRichard Katz who, after years of obscurity as a musician, has, to hisdiscomfort, hit the popularity jackpot. Patty sleeps with Richard in theBerglunds’ holiday cottage, bequeathed to Walter by his mother, while Walter isrunning the busy schedule of enabling multinationals to inflict further damageon nature and fending off come-ons from Lalitha. This will, in due course,precipitate a crisis in the Berglund marriage. Walter’s son, in the meanwhile,is running his own profiteering schemes, in partnership with other unscrupulouscharacters, which involve fleecing the US army in Iraq with faulty army vehiclesfor exorbitant prices. Joey has Republican sympathies and Walter’s ownlucrative dealings with the Neo-cons do not temper his horror at his son’sbetrayal of the ideology.

It all endswell, you will be pleased to know, for the Berglunds (well, more or less). Whenthe novel ends Walter and Patty are back together (Lalitha having the decencyto die in a tragic road crash), and their children are settled.

Freedom is a neat novel. Despite itsvarious strands and the vast expanses of time covered (a large part of thenovel focuses on the years after 2001, but the time period stretches from the1970s to present day), Franzen brings everything neatly together towards theend, yet succeeds in not making it appearing too neat or formulaic.

Via theBerglund family saga Franzen touchesseveral contemporary issues relevant both to America and wider world: theatrocities at the World Trade Centre in 2001 and the ill-advised invasion ofIraq; destruction of the natural habitats of birds and animals (a subject apparentlyclose to Franzen’s heart; he is particularly fascinated by the songbird—asmentioned in his 2007 memoir The Discomfort Zone—which Walter sovaliantly tries to protect) and the effect on environment; and fatigue anddecline of liberal thinking in America (Franzen presumably is a Democrat, butWalter, the fictional democrat, opines at one point that there is nothing wrongwith his wife’s mental state that a job wouldn’t resolve). All these themesblend so well in the narrative structure of the novel that at no stage do theyseem like an unnecessary add-on.

That is notall. One of the many reasons why this novel has struck a chord with widerbook-reading public (I think) is that ittouches upon and gives sometime-ironic-sometimes-sincere comment upon many contemporaryissues close to the heart of the developed world middle-classes. In that sensethe novel is similar to The Corrections, only better, as it isnot as inward looking as The Corrections.

Ultimately,though, the novel succeeds because of Franzen’s eminently believable,well-rounded and compassionate portraits of the worlds of his protagonists. Thestory of Walter and Patty and their children and their friend Richard is thestory of you and me. And it is told in a manner that is funny, witty,compassionate, humane, and, above all, utterly absorbing. (Not easy, this; IanMcEwan could not pull it off in Solar which is on the theme ofglobal warming; there is a cheeky nod to McEwan’s Atonement in this novel,when Joey struggles to interest himself in the descriptions of rooms andpaintings.) Freedom is a very well-written novel. At almost 600 pages it ishumongous, but it is also a literary page-turner.

In hermemoir Patty Berglund mentions that she is reading War and Peace; she evencompares herself at one point to Narasha. Has Franzen written a modern day Warand Peace? I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t read War and Peace. Is Freedom the Great American Novel? Iwouldn’t know about it either, because I haven’t read many American novels. WhatI can say is Freedom is a smashing good read, one of the most enjoyablenovels I have read so far this year. Unhesitatingly recommended.

Steve Jobs Dies

2011-10-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

I would belying if I said I was a fan of Steve Jobs. That is not to say I was not a fanof Steve jobs. I just had no views on Steve Jobs, not being a techno-geek.

Myrelationship to technology is roughly the same as that Dawn French’s to lowcarb diet. I don’t understand it; I am suspicious of it; I can do without it;and I can’t understand others who make a fuss about it.

Yet even Ihad heard of Steve Jobs as some sort of visionary (who was also an immenselywealthy man).

It is notmy intention to write an obituary of Steve Jobs, here. However, when I did agoogle search and went through some of the obituaries I learned some factsabout his personal life which I thought were interesting.

There wereseveral facts about Steve Jobs that I did not know. I am aware that there isnothing sui generis about these facts, and they assume interest (to me) onlybecause of what Steve Jobs went on to become.

I did notknow that he was half Arab by birth. His biological father was a Syrian Muslimby the name of Abdulfattah Jandali (wholater became a political science professor). His mother, Joanne, was Americanof German-Swiss ancestry. Both hisparents were very young college graduates when Joanne fell pregnant. Her fatherwould not allow her to marry an Arab and under pressure from her white,conservative, Christian family Joannae went to San Fracisco on her own whereshe gave birth to a boy. It was arranged that the child would be adopted. Yearslater, in a speech Jobs recalled that his biological mother was very keen thatthe adoptive parents be college graduates. Accordingly a rich lawyer and hiswife were all set to adopt Joanne’s child. Except that they changed their minds at the last minute and decided that they really wanted a girl child. Paul andClara Jobs, a childless Armenian couple that was on the waiting list, wascontacted in the middle of the night and asked whether they would want to adopta boy, and they said yes. Joanne was very unhappy when she learned that theprospective adoptive parents had never been to college. She refused to sign theadoption papers. She relented after a few months only when Paul Jobs promised her thatthe boy would go to college one day. The adoption finally went through and thebaby was named Steve.

AbdulfattahJandali was not involved in any of this. Years later he recalled that at thattime he was very much in love with Joanne, but her ‘tyrannical’ father who was ‘likea dictator’ refused to accept him as his son-in-law because he was a Muslim anda foreigner. According to Jandali, Joanne just ‘upped and left’. He hadapparently no idea where she had gone.

The ironyis: within 10 months of giving away their son for adoption Abdulfattah Jandaliand Joanne married, and very soon after that her father, so opposed to theinter-racial marriage, died. The couple went on to have another child, adaughter, who is Steve Jobs’s biological sister. The marriage did not last and,in the early 1960s, Joanne and Abdulfattah Jandali divorced (or he walked outon his family). Joanne married again andtheir daughter, Mona, took on the name of her step-father and became MonaSimpson.

I had neverheard of Mona Simpson before but apparently she is a novelist who has publishedfive novels.

Paul Jobskept the promise he had given to Joanne. When he was 17 Steve Jobs enrolledin Reed college that was, as he recalled later, as expensive as Stanford.Almost all of his working class parents’ savings were spent on his collegeeducation and he did not even like the course. After a year he dropped out of the course and begandropping in on courses that looked interesting. He slept on the floor of hisfriend’s room, returned coke bottles to buy food with and every Sunday walked 7miles to a Hare Krishna temple where he would have his only square meal of theweek.

I did notknow that at the age of 19 Jobs travelled to India where he stayed in an ashramof an Indian mystique, the intriguingly named Neem Karoli Baba. When returned toAmerica several months later, he had shaved his head and he was wearingtraditional Indian clothes. He had become a Buddhist.

Steve Jobstayed Buddhist for the rest of his life (although his published photos in thelast decade of so show suggest that he stopped wearing traditional Indianclothes).

Steve Jobsstarted Apple in his parents’ garage when he was 20. The rest, as they say, washistory. It would however be fair to say that it was not smooth sailing all theway for Jobs. In the mid-1980s he was publically ousted from Apple. He founded anothercompany named NeXT, which was not the whopping success he thought it would be;but the other company he formed, Pixer, went on to produce the first featurelength animated film, Toy Story, the first of the many successful films Pixerproduced in partnership with Disney. In2006 Disney bought Pixer in a reported all-stock transaction worth $7.4 billiondollars.

In 1997Apple bought NeXT and Jobs made a triumphant return to the company heco-founded twenty years previously in his parents’ garage.

In the1970s Jobs had a relationship with a Bay area painter named Chrisann Brennan,his first serious girl-friend, and had a daughter, named Lisa, from thatrelationship. Jobs, who was very wealthy by that time initially refused toaccept that he was the father and swore in a court document that he could not possibly be the father because he was ‘sterile and infertile’, and therefore physically incapable of procreating.He later accepted that he was the father and was reconciled with her. Hefinanced Lisa’s university education at Harvard. He married Laurene Powell in aBuddhist ceremony in 1991 and the couple has three children.

In 2004Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which is generally considered to havevery poor prognosis. However he apparently had a rare form of cancer whichcould be treated with surgery. For several months following the diagnosis, Jobsreportedly refused to follow doctors’ advice to undergo surgery andexperimented with Eastern (presumably unproven) alternative treatments. Heaccepted to undergo surgery after nine months. The surgery gave him seven moreyears to live, helped, one assumes, along the way by another major surgery—a livertransplant—in 2009.

Jobs was,for all outward appearances, not very curious about his biological parents. Atone point he is believed to have made the observation that he did not believein genetics but in experiences. He considered his adoptive parents as his real mother and father. However he is believed to have tracked down his biologicalmother with the help of a private detective in the mid 1980s and also met hisnovelist sister to whom he became very close. Jobs was invited by Mona Simpsonat the launch of her debut novel Anywhere But Here’. Jobs invited hisbiological mother to some of his big launches.

Jobs never publicallydiscussed his biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali; and it is very probablethat the two men never met in life. Indeedit is possible that Jandali was not even aware until a few years ago that theson given away by Joanne for adoption all those years ago, whom he had never seen inperson, was the famous Steve Jobs. However it seems inconceivable that Jobs (whohad gone to some lengths to trace and contact his biological mother and whowas close to his biological sister from mid-1980s onwards) did not know who hisbiological father was.

AbdulfattahJandali, a non-practising Muslim (who nevertheless ‘believes in Islam—doctrineand culture’) never met his son. Afterhe left his wife and young daughter Jandali drifted from jobs to jobs before heleft academia altogether and for decades has lived in Reno where he is a well-off vice-president of a casino. Jandali, the only son of a Syrian ‘self-mademillionaire’, was educated in Beirut and came to United States when he was 18and obtained a PhD in political science very swiftly. As reticent as his famous son,Jandali never spoke about his famous son until recently. None of his erstwhile colleagues inthe academic world, nor his colleagues in Reno (save some close friends), knewthat Jandali was Steve Job’s father.

In Augustthis year, the month Jobs stepped down as Apple’s chief, Jandali broke hisdecades long silence on his famous son (incredibly to a British tabloid). He expressed regret thathe never got to know his famous son. However he also clarified that he was notprepared ‘even if either of us was on our death bed to pick up a phone and callhim. Steve would have to do that.’ Apparently the Syrian pride ‘does notwant him [Jobs] to think that I am after his fortune.’ But he longed to meethis son. He hoped that ‘before it is too late he [Steve Jobs] would reach out to me. Even tohave one coffee with him just once would make me a very happy man.’

Jobs didnot respond to this very public appeal from his father.

Whencontacted by newspapers in Reno after the death of Steve Jobs was announced Jandali declined to comment. ‘I really don’thave anything to say,’ he said, ‘I know the news.’

A statementfrom Apple announcing Jobs’s passing on said: ‘In his public life Steve was avisionary. In his private life he cherished his family.’

In a speechhe gave to the students of Stanford University in 2005 Jobs had this to sayabout death:

‘No one wants to die. Evenpeople who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet deathis the destination we all share.’

After a very remarkable life Jobs has gone to his finaldestination, the very best invention (as he said in his famous Stanford speech)of life. May his soul rest in peace.

Another Round of Quantitative Easing: It Won't Work

2011-10-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Bank of England (BoE) has finally announced what many pundits were predicting it would do. It has decided to print more money. (I know! I know! This is primarily a book blog, but my escape clause is I have given myself permission to write on any subject that happens to interest me at a given time).

Let’s recap a bit, shall we?

We are in the middle of the worst recession since the Black Death. Europe is crumbling; America, according to many economists, self-appointed experts, and financial hacks is heading for a double dip recession; and Japan enjoys the dubious distinction of having interest rates that are even lower than those of the BoE (and where has it got them?). Some might hope (in desperation) that the emerging giants of Asia—China and India—will be the engines to kick-start world economy, but it ain’t gonna happen. China and India are bubbles. This notion that there are more than 2 billion people out there, all salivating at the prospect of buying Western goods, while it might make a compelling narrative to hack out an article for some financial mag, is ludicrous. If anything, chances are that the European and Western demands for Chinese trinkets and plastic dolls will go down and China may have to look to its domestic market to maintain its growth (which is slowing, suggesting that the economy is overheating), and whatever else the Chinese peasants might need, I am guessing they would do without a Barbie doll. The Chinese property market is heading for, as they say, a hard landing; and the time is not far off when the Chinese regime will have to think hard about how many more dams it is going to build. Not good news for exporters to China.

Let’s also give it a thought why we are in recession. OK, the monetary crisis was triggered by the dodgy shenanigans of the banks which began speculating money they did not own in riskier and riskier endeavours.

But that is not the whole story.

We in the West have been living way beyond our means for a long time; and now it’s payback time. Debt is never good, especially when you’re paying it down. When the time arrives to pay back your debts, the good time you’ve had with the debt is a faint memory. I accept that there is no escaping debts in the modern (capitalist) societies. However, there are—to paraphrase football jargon—debts and there are debts. If you’ve a mortgage that is an essential debt. If, on the other hand, you’ve built up huge credit card debts buying crap you have watched advertisement of on the idiot box or some other junk you’ve got to have because some vacuous friends of yours have bought it (building their own mountains of credit card debts), then you are the author of your own misfortune.

A friend of mine who recently bought an i-pad (which he can afford but does not need; at least I don’t think he needs, as he has a perfectly serviceable lap top, which, incidently, he upgrades every two years; the guy is a manager of a warehouse) told me that ‘research’ has apparently shown that people owning i-pads are happier than people who own androids, or some such nonsense. It astonishes me that someone would find this worth researching (but it wouldn't astonish me at all to know that the ‘research’ was funded by a grant from the UK government); but even if it is true, you'd agree with me that it says more about the state of collective British psych (or, if you are pedantic, the colelctive psych of people interviewed in the survey) rather than inherent antidepressant properties of i-pad.

It never ceases to amaze me seeing people entrapped in the cage of consumer debt, the walls of which they have lovingly built themselves. For too long people in Britain have been building up debts to service lifestyles which they can’t afford (and probably makes them more miserable; I mean if your self-esteem and inner peace is entirely determined by whether you own a posh car, or show off a fancy hand-bag made from the hide of an animal, or own some ridiculously priced gadget which is the absolute tops until the next absolute tops comes along the next day and you hanker after that, one does not have to be an Indian guru to figure out that it is going to come crashing around your ears sooner or later). It can’t go on, and now the time has arrived to swallow the bitter pill.

(It further astonishes me to see middle classes, which I would have thought ought to know better, getting entangled into the debt trap. They have assets (which they risk of losing) if they can’t pay their debts, yet some of them carried on spending money, tying the money in harebrained schemes etc., and building up debts. If you don’t own any assets, if you are one of the beneficiaries of the benefit system, sure, carry on with your hedonistic life-style. What have you got to lose? Just say the right things to your doctor who, for no other reason than to get you out of his office, will support your disability claim, and you are off.)

OK, enough ranting against the consumerism plaguing the British society (in particular the middle classes). Back to macroeconomics.

The way I see it we are in recession (or almost in recession) because ultimately there is not enough money in the system. That could be either because there is not enough money available or not enough money is changing hands.

So what is the answer of the BoE? They are going to create money electronically. It is not the money that is coming into the system from some outside source, mind (e.g. exports, although, come to think of it what is it that Britain produces, other than weapons of mass destructions that are sold to the African and Middle Eastern despots, that is desired by the world?, although, in recent years we have tried to export hooliganism). This money is simply printed and poured into the system. The 64 million dollars question is: will the money go to the part of the economy that needs it? The BoE will give money to the banks and its big hope will be the banks will start lending money. But will they? They did not do it the first time round (paying down as they were their own bad debts). What if the banks may once again decide to hoard the cash? In which case the money will not come into system at all.
Suppose the banks do decide to lend the money. Will there be appetite amongst people to take it, especially if there is job insecurity? Take the housing market as an example. The house prices in Britain—barring some crazy parts in London—are generally considered to be down, and they are expected to fall down further next year. Why might that be? Obvious answer is people are either unable or unwilling to take out a mortgage (which is ultimately a debt). The commonly held assumption is that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there, itching to get on the housing ladder, but can’t because they can’t secure mortgages. Even if this is true, there may be very good reasons why at least a proportion of them is unable to secure mortgages: the banks have become more careful when they lend. Gone are the days of 100% loan (now that was a bubble) but many banks may require 15-20% deposits, and if you can’t afford that, they are not going to lend you. What I am saying is: just because BoE has decided to print money, it does not mean that banks will relax their lending rules any time soon or there will be a sudden demand for incurring more debt.

The inevitable consequence of printing money is an increase in inflation. That is if it works and the BoE achieves its aim of getting more money into the system. If there is a lot of money sloshing about, it stands to reason that its value will be lowered. Which means the prices of everything from utilities to commodities will shoot up. And that is potentially a risky thing. Controlling inflation is like riding a Bengal tiger. There is no guarantee that you will be able to control the beast. And with the public sector salaries frozen for the foreseeable future, that is going to hurt. Shadeloads of people in the public sector are going to lose their jobs in the coming years (primarily because the jobs were probably non-jobs in the first place, created by the previous Labour government, which had no real answer for the big structural deficits in the British economy, and simply created public sector non-jobs from the money pumped into the system by the City), and there is no way the private sector has the capacity to accommodate the orphaned (as my friend, the warehouse manager, puts it, who needs strategic manager for waste disposal system?). That will put more strain on the system, as these people will turn to the government for support at a time when less money will come to the government by way of taxes.

And to make the miseries of those, who still have jobs and are thrifty, complete, the interest rates are at what the BBC never tires of repeating ad nauseum historic low. Anyone in Britain with an ounce of sense will be focusing on paying off their debts, worried that they may not have the job security; and with the inflation looming the tendency would be not to spend (saving money for the rainy day and all that. (I know of some people who are now buying shares and, worryingly, dabbling in riskier practices such as spread-baiting to see their money grow, as the interest rates are ridiculously low).

This, I believe, is the Keynesian paradox where everyone becomes thrifty at exactly the wrong time, although I also think that the moment of spending your way out of recession—the Keynesian solution to Great Depression— is long gone. Much as I hate to admit it, dodgy Dave—smoother than snot on the doorknob—is right when he said in the Neo-Nasty party conference that we need to man up and pay down our credit card debts or some such cheap lines his speech writer wrote for him.

Quantitative easing is an exercise in futility. It will not work. It did not work in Japan, and it won’t work here.

Why there aren't Many Jewish Writers in Britain

2011-10-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

When Howard Jacobson won the 2010 Booker Prize I was pleased for two reasons: firstly, Jacobson is one of the writers I have enjoyed reading. Even when he is not at his best, as in Who is Sorry Now?, he is entertaining. And when he is firing on all cylinders, as in Coming from Behind and PeepingTom, he is absolutely first rate. This was the first time Jacobson was short-listed for the prize and the award was a long overdue recognition of a writer who has produced high quality novels over a long period.

The second reason I felt pleased was the novel, The Finkler Question, was described as a comic novel. In an interview after the award, Jacobson was at pains to clarify that he was a comic / serious writer. He was not comic light. (Who can be described as a comic light writer? P.G. Wodehouse?) The Finkler Question, he (somewhat pompously) declared, was comedy taken in to troubled and tragic areas. Whatever. I love reading comic novels (both comic/serious and comic/light), and I was pleased that after a long time a comic novel was considered worthy of a literary and fairly influential (at least in the UK) award.

It did not occur to me to be pleased that Jacobson was also a Jewish writer.

I read The Finkler Question last month and thoroughly enjoyed it. I am not going to review The Finkler Question here. It is a typical Jacobson fare, about a middle aged man obsessed about Jewishness, the twist being he is not actually Jewish. It is a very funny novel, and very moving in parts (perhaps that’s what meant when he said he was a comic / serious writer). It is, like most of Jacobson’s earlier novels, a very Jewish novel. But I do not immediately think Jewish when I think of Jacobson. He is a British writer.

However, judging by some of the comments Jacobson made in the wake of his Booker triumph, his Jewish heritage in the wider context of British culture was very much on Jacobson’s mind when he wrote The Finkler Question.

‘The Question of anti-Semitism in this country [Britain] is vexed,’ Jacobson said. ‘Do we Jews imagine it, do we half want it to define ourselves by, do we contribute to it by harping on about it (a particularly sinister suggestion)? Such are the questions the characters in The Finkler Question discuss—a reflection of what the British Jews are asking each other.’

So The Finkler Question, at one level, by its author’s admission, a novel about what it means to be a Jew in modern day Britain. Fair enough. Does that make Jacobson a Jewish writer? The man himself appears to be ill at ease with this idea of being defined by his Jewishness. In one of the many post-Booker interviews he gave, Jacobson, when directly questioned about it, said:

‘Although I talk about things Jewish, when I hear anyone saying, “another book about Jewish identity from Howard Jacobson”, I think that's not what I'm writing about. For me the Jewish world is one of the worlds that I happen to know. It was the world I grew up in, so it's full of references for me. It's almost like the miners in DH Lawrence or the sailors in Joseph Conrad. You don't go to Joseph Conrad because you want to read a sea story, or to DH Lawrence because you want to read about miners, that's just where it's set. Essentially, without being grand about it, you're just writing about humanity. If you asked me is this book about being Jewish or being a man? I would say that it's more about being a man.’

Jonathan Safron Foyer remarked that had Jacobson been born in America and had written exactly the same kind of novels he would have been considered up there with Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, the two great twentieth century Jewish-American chroniclers. Jacobson has always disliked the epithet ‘British Philip Roth’ bestowed upon him by some, and once remarked semi-jocularly that he considered himself to be the love child of Philip Roth and Jane Austen.

However, the comments of Jonathan Saffron Foer (whom some consider to be the 21^st century writer in the tradition of Roth on the basis of two novels he has so far published) raises a curious point: there really is no tradition of Jewish-British literature the way there is of Jewish American literature. Why might this be?

One obvious reason (to me) is that there aren’t very many Jews in Britain. This is a country of more than 60 million, of which less than 0.5% are Jewish, not a huge pool. So realistically how many novels are you going to get about Jewishness? Not many I would have thought. So a simple answer to the question why there aren’t more Jewish writers in Britain is that there aren’t many Jews in Britain.

Another reason could be Britain’s curiously monolithic, inward looking, (some might say self-satisfied, self-important, and smug) culture. I remember coming across a comment somewhere that Britain is country with great past and no future. That is obviously a hyperbole, but, like all hyperboles, there is a kernel of truth hidden somewhere at its core. The English are very sure of their place in the scheme of things (at the top rung of the ladder) and have an exalted and unchanging view of the past. The Jews, like the Irish, were just about tolerated; they were invited to take a ringside seat and spectate; but neither of the communities was thought to have anything worthwhile to contribute to a culture that was already formed. Prime Minister’s Cameron’s assertion that state multiculturalism has failed in Britain, while it might not be factually incorrect, is symptomatic of the sentiments bubbling just under the surface, attempt as it does to put the blame for this failure at the doors of the ‘other’, ‘minority’ cultures. Although I doubt very much that Cameron had the Jews in his mind when he made his crass speech—he was aiming at the British Muslims, majority of whom come from South East Asia—if we try to apply these sentiments to Jewish literature, we can perhaps begin to understand why there isn’t as well-known a tradition of Jewish literature in Britain as there is in America. There was a great pressure on the Jews, one of the only two ‘ethnic minorities’ in Britain (the other being Irish, but the Irish have always had their tradition of literature, primarily, in my view, because they had their own nation-state where the Irish way of life and Irish traditions could be preserved) before the arrivals of the migrants from South East Asia and the Caribbean, to assimilate. And many Jews did assimilate. Assimilation, in its extreme form, demands that the assimilator jettison his cultural, religious heritage and embrace in totality the culture surrounding him. Unlike in America, the Jews in Britain did not (could not) contribute to the construction of the national identity. The English knew who they were, what they were, and did not want foreigners speaking strange languages and with curious customs to sully the matters, thank you very much. The ‘minorities’, migrants if you will, have two choices: either forget your identity and embrace the main-stream culture (even though that would not make them ‘propha’ English); or live in a ghetto.

In his 2004 novel, The Making of Henry (which I have reviewed earlier on this blog), this is more or less Jacobson says (far more elegantly than I ever can) via the novel’s curmudgeonly eponymous protagonist:

‘In America [Henry says] the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity, had made the American cause their own, had even shaped it, sometimes dangerously—tempting fate, risking a backlash—in their own image. Not in England, not in Manchester, not on the Pennines. Yes, they were dutiful citizens; they paid their taxes, fought in wars, performed charitable deeds, gave service to the community—but only for the right, at last, to be left alone to notice nothing, and not be noticed noticing it.’

At one point in the novel, Henry’s girl friend, who insists she is non-Jewish (although he is convinced that she is), tells Henry off about his ‘self-conscious’ Jew thing.

‘I think it is childish, Henry [Moira says]. No one is asking you to pretend that you are somebody other than you are . . .But it is provincial to keep going on about it. And insecure. In my experience people who can’t stop talking about themselves aren’t easy with it. The man of the world accepts who he is and the influences which have made him and then gets on with living in the world. The big world.’

(Henry feels no obligation to take on board the above advice and keeps up with his Jewish thing, making The Making of Henry, a very Jewish novel. In another interview Jacobson said that Kalooki Nights was his most Jewish novel. I can’t imagine how any novel can be more Jewish than The Making of Henry, but, as I an Americans friend of mine is fond of saying, I sure am gonna find out.)

Things do not necessarily become easier for the children of the migrants who grew up to be British. As Linda Grant, one of the finest Jewish writers writing in English today (although many would not identify her as Jewish) said once:

‘How does someone in Britain born into both an observant conservative Jewish family but going to school every day in a non-Jewish environment, construct an identity they can use as a writer?’

This is a dilemma faced by, I suspect, almost all ‘ethnic’ minorities, not only by the Jewish community. The ‘minorities’, Jewish and others, with their distinct pasts, cannot, will not, be absorbed into Britishness—cultural, communal or territorial—into the bargain a sense of inferiority would be imposed upon them (as evinced by the attacks on the Muslim community, majority of which is law-abiding, by politicians of all ranks and parties and the barely suppressed Islamophobic atmosphere that pervades the majority community). If one dares to look into one’s community the entire time one risks getting pigeonholed and, linked to it, stereotyped. It is interesting that Monica Aliand Zadie Smith, who burst on to the UK literary scene with their debut novels which can be loosely described as having been derived from their part-cultural (‘part’ because both had one parent English) background, felt compelled to move away from the ‘ethnic backgrounds’ in their subsequent novels. Jhumpa Lahiri, the 2000 Pulitzer winner, has taken inspiration from her culture in her published output so far. Lahiri was born in London, but went to live in America at a young age with her Indian parents; and one wonders whether that has anything to do with the nature of her literary output and the unfaltering manner in which she ‘allows’ the influences that have shaped her to enter, dominate, even, her fiction.

So, why aren’t there more Jewish writers writing Jewish fiction in the UK? The answer: there aren’t many Jews in Britain. And the British culture discourages strong expressions of identity when it (the culture) does not conform to the hidebound ideas of the majority community of what elements go on to make a rich culture.

Here is a WikiPedia list of British Jewish writers. I don’t know how complete the list is. Not all on the list were born in Britain.

Of the list, the ones I have read (and liked) are Anita Brookner, Linda Grant, Howard Jacobson, Ruth Prawer-Jhabwala (not born in Britain and hasn’t lived in Britain for decades), Arthus Koestler (not born in Britain), Marghanita Laski (have read only one novel and absolutely loved it), Bernice Rubens (winner of the 1969 Booker), William Sutcliffe (didn’t know he was Jewish. His Are You Experienced? is a laugh out loud romp), Zoe Heller (listed as Jewish in WikiPedia because her father was Jewish; has immigrated to America), the great Muriel Spark (although she converted to Catholicism), and last but not the least Elias Canetti (Bulgarian born, but lived in Britain for 20 odd years. Auto da Fe, Canetti's only full length novel is, in my view, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, although Canetti wrote it before he arrived in England, and the novel is not set here).

Then there are Stephen Fry and Will Self (both Jewish from their mothers’ side) whom I have read but don’t rate too high.

I have read a novel each of Naomi Alderman and Lisa Appignanesi, and while I was not bowled over by tem, I have kept an open mind.

Finally there is Simon Sebag Montefiore who has written a novel (which I haven’t read) but is more well known as a historian.