John Updike RIP

John Updike died of lung cancer, in a hospice, last month, at the age of 76. Many would say he was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, deserving of the Nobel. He was certainly one of the most prolific: in a career spanning five decades, Updike published 28 novels, 14 brick-thick collections of short stories, and 9 volumes of poetry. Add to this the countless reviews he wrote, on subjects as varying as golf, paintings, and cartoons—he was apparently an able cartoonist—, and you will get some idea of the intellectual fecundity of the man. Like the great Somerset Maugham, renowned for writing a few pages every day, 365 days a year—on days when he did not feel inspired, Maugham would fill pages with his signature—Updike, too, till the end, laboured in front of his typewriter for several hours every day.

It was ineluctable that some or more of the output was ordinary, especially his later works with their super-clever premises, which seemed mere vehicles for Updike to deluge his readers with digressive, random pontifications on whatever subject that happened to be on his mind at the time . The patience of all but the most generous reader would surely stretch and snap as they plough through Toward the End of Time, Updike’s 18th novel, as its senescent garrulous narrator yammers on about quantum mechanics and horticulture. The gimmicky Seek My Face, his 54th book, written in just one chapter—indeed one paragraph— left the readers less than enchanted with pages and pages of textbook criticism, and offered no new insights into the works (or lives) of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, the two artists upon whom two of the main characters of the novels were based. Gertrude and Claudius, his self-conscious prequel to Hamlet, was strangely devoid of any passion or drama, as it meandered along, never getting out of the far left lane. In Terrorist, his final novel, Updike showed glimpses of his sly wit and linguistic brilliance that had earned him legion of admirers in his distinguished writing career, but the novel, which, in contrast to his more recent novels, was well paced, suffered from a weak central plot and was ultimately unconvincing.

It seems that once he was through writing the great novels of American man (I am using the word in its gender specific sense) and the sexual revolution sweeping the middle classes in the sixties, Updike, driven by the need—an eye on the Nobel perhaps?—to move on to weightier subject matters, ended up writing plenty about not very much. What also became increasingly noticeable in the later works was his obsessively detailed eye for the quotidian. The unstoppably vivid descriptions of mundane occurrences such as a car being started and going past an observer or the preparation a tuna salad, running into several paragraphs and giving the reader no way-stations to pause for rest, served little purpose other than adding to their sense of ennui. The stylistic excellence and pseudophilosophical insights failed to camouflage the lack of coherent or, in some instances, plausible premise, and the work was about as captivating to the common reader as a monograph studying Julius Caesar's Latin and comparing its rhythmic structure to Byzantine hymns. The whole exercise, it seemed, no longer had any goals beyond enjoyment, dare I say egotistical?, of its own overbred faculties.

However, posterity will judge John Updike not on his lesser, autumnal offerings, but on novels such as the Rabbit books, the zeitgeist series that represented the silent American men of his generation (and won him the Pulitzer twice), and Couples, which made him famous and which won him the reputation of the novelist of sexual revolution, or, as a critic once put it hyperbolically, the novelist who kicked down the doors of American bedrooms. Updike made his reputation on effectively transcribing the angst of common people who outwardly appeared to be content with their lot; and the deliberately provocative manner in which he wrote about sex earned him millions of fans all over the world, but also made him vulnerable to the charge that what he wrote was mild pornography disguised as social insight. Be that as it may, Updike perhaps realised that the seam was too narrow, and moved on to different, abstruse, subjects. Shorn of new ideas he kept going by giving himself technical challenges; writer's block was but a surface for him to practise his craft. Herman Hesse, the great German novelist and Nobel Laureate, published The Glass Bead Game, in 1943. Hesse was 65 when his magnum opus was published. He did not publish a single novel in the remainder of his life. Not everyone has the courage or insight to accept that the stream of creativity has dried up. What you end up doing then, to borrow a phrase from Truman Capote, is typing, not writing.

Philip Roth, Updike’s contemporary and no less a chronicler of American, albeit Jewish American, adultery, was the first to pay him the following tribute:

‘[Updike is] our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable.’

Updike was an accomplished and technically gifted wordsmith. He had, in abundance, all the virtues a writer would dream of. Was he a great writer? Probably.

Book of the Month: The song Before It Is Sung (Justin Cartwright)

I will crush and destroy the criminals who have dared to oppose themselves to Providence and to me. These traitors to their own people deserve ignominious death, and this is what they shall have. This time the full price will be paid by all those who are involved, and by their families, and by all those who have helped them. This nest of vipers who have tried to sabotage the grandeur of my Germany will be exterminated once and for all.
Adolf Hitler to Joachim von Ribentrop (20th July 1944)

On 20 July 1944 a bomb inside a briefcase went off in Adolf Hitler’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’—his command post for the Eastern Front in Rastenburg, Prussia. The bomb was placed by Major Claus von Stauffenberg. The intent was to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazis. Hitler was not killed; he sustained injuries to his forearms and lost hearing permanently in his right ear. Stauffenberg, who had returned to Berlin, planning to seize the city, believing that Hitler was dead, was arrested and shot at midnight on the same day by a firing squad. Within days almost all the fellow conspirators of Stauffenberg were rounded up, and after a show trial in the People’s Court (set up to judge political crimes), presided over by the rabid Nazi Roland Freisler (who was to die a few months later during an air raid on Berlin), executed. The executions were carried out by hanging the conspirators slowly from meat-hooks; their death agonies were filmed and shown to the Fuhrer.

One of the co-conspirators of von Stauffenberg was Adam von Trott. Born into a wealthy, aristocratic Prussian family, von Trott came to the UK in 1931 as a Rhodes scholar and studied at the Balliol College, Oxford. While in Oxford, von Trott became friends with a Jewish philosopher the same age as he, who had come to the UK a decade earlier, from Russia. The young philosopher’s name was Isaiah Berlin. von Trott returned to Germany and trained as a lawyer. He visited England on a few occasions in the thirties. In 1940, von Trott joined the Nazi party and became the legation counsellor in the German foreign office. Charged with complicity in the July 20, 1944 plot, he was hanged a month later. His three young children were taken by the Gestapo, following Hitler’s decision to introduce Sippenhaft—‘Absolute responsibility of kin . . . a very old custom practised among out forefathers’ as Heinrich Himmler declared. von Trott was thirty five when he died. Berlin outlived his friend by decades, and went on to become one of the most influential liberal philosopher and historian of ideas of the twentieth century. He died in 1997, at the age of eighty eight.

The conspirators involved in the July 1944 plot joined the resistance movement by different routes. Stauffenberg, apparently, was appalled by the atrocities committed by the SS (Schutz Staffeinel) during Operation Barbarossa. von Trott’s path to resistance was as long as it was tortuous. After spending a year at the Balliol, where he formed a friendship not only with Berlin, but also with David Astor (who edited The Observer for well over two decades with great distinction) von Trott returned to Germany and worked as a public prosecutor in Hesse. While working in Hesse, von Trott wrote a letter to Manchester Guardian (in response to a report in it that Jews were denied justice in Germany). In the letter von Trott claimed that no anti-Semitism existed in the courts of Hesse. This letter, at the very least a grotesque distortion of what was going on in Germany at the time, incensed Berlin and put their friendship under severe strain. Whether it was irrevocably breached or whether it healed with the passage of time is a matter of opinion. David Astor, close to both men, asserted, in a letter to New York Book Reviews in 1998, a year after Berlin’s death, that after the temporary strain in the relationship following von Trott’s ill-advised letter to the Manchester Guardian, the two men renewed their friendship. Certainly, Berlin, in later life, spoke of and wrote about von Trott in glowing terms. In 1997, the year he died, Berlin invited von Trott’s widow and two daughters to visit him, and, later, wrote to his friends, ‘I enjoyed the visit of the Trotts very much. I did indeed talk about Adam as they wished me to, and said everything I felt and thought.’ However, all of this was after von Trott had redeemed himself with his martyrdom. It is not known whether in von Trott’s life (which was to end on a meat-hook at Ploetzwnsee Prison ten years after his letter) the two men—one an erudite, witty, liberal thinker; the other an admirer of Hegel and German idealism— managed to rediscover their friendship. On the eve of the Second World War, von Trott visited England, and later America, to shore up support against the Nazis. He had secret meetings with Lord Halifex, who arranged for him to meet the British prime-minister, Neville Chamberlain. He also met Felix Frankfurter in America. While in England, he briefly met Berlin and requested a letter of introduction to Fankfurter, which Berlin duly supplied. However, what did Berlin, and others in Oxford, really think of von Trott at this time? History tells us that von Trott’s efforts did not come to fruition; the allies did not support the anti-Nazi conspirators. Ignoring his friends’ advice von Trott returned to Germany. In 1940 (relatively late, it has to be said) he joined the Nazi party (what did Berlin make of it?) and, while serving as the legation officer, he also became a member of the Kreisau Circle—a group of intellectuals opposed to the Nazi regime.

What was it that made von Trott, who appeared, even to his well-wishers in England, to be an apologist (if not an enthusiastic supporter) of the Third Reich at one stage, risk his life while plotting for its downfall in less than a decade? How did he arrive at the point of his final, heroic, act? It is this question that Justin Cartwright explores in his splendid novel The Song Before It Is Sung (The title is inspired from a quotation of Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian socialism, ‘Where is the song before it is sung?’, which Berlin, a great admirer of Herzen, often cited.) Cartwright makes it explicit in the ‘Afterword’ that the novel is based in part on the friendship between von Trott and Berlin: Axel von Gottenberg of the novel is von Trott, and Eliya Mendel is Isaiah Berlin (Berlin’s father’s name was Mendel).

Almost six decades after von Gottenberg is hanged, Conrad Senior, an Oxford graduate and a former student of Mendel is bequeathed his, Mendel’s, cache of papers and letters. In a letter left for Conrad, Mendel indicates that he had been haunted to the end of his life by the suspicion (and associated guilt) that he might have treated von Gottenberg unjustly; that had he given more support to von Gottenberg when he came to the UK on the eve of the Second World War, von Gottenberg might have been spared his appalling death. Why does Mendel choose Conrad, who, post-Oxford, has not made much of his life? Because Conrad, while not Mendel’s ‘most brilliant’ student, is ‘the most human’. Conrad, whose life (as his increasingly exasperated and disenchanted doctor partner suggests unkindly) has been a series of nearlies, clutches to the Mendel papers as if it were a rope suspended over a pit of dragons. He decides that what Mendel wanted him to investigate was to find out whether or not von Gottenberg was a self-romanticizing, ceremonious, politically ambivalent, and gullible aristocrat who over-estimated his sphere of influence and paid with his life; or whether he was genuine in his revulsion of the Nazi atrocities and echt in his attempts to overthrow the Nazis. The Song Before It Is Sung is the story of Conrad Senior’s quest for the truth. It is a powerful exploration of guilt, human frailty, errancy, friendship, mortality, and courage. Cartwright weaves an intricate web, mixing, effortlessly, fact and fiction. The von Gottenberg of this narrative is a deeply-rooted-to-the Fatherland, Junker (landed nobility of Prussia), with a sense of noblesse oblige, and Cartwright effectively conveys the aura of tragedy and doom surrounding von Gottenberg. The story is recounted in two different timeframes; the narrative moves back and forth between past and present. As Senior becomes more and more obsessed with the dark recesses of the European history of the twentieth century, his personal life disintegrates. His partner finds solace in the arms of her work-colleague, and leaves him. As Conrad traces the inevitable trajectory of von Gottenberg’s life towards its doom, his own life, so it seems, is heading towards a different kind of annihilation. The parallels between Conrad’s life—in the here-and-now—and those of the two men he is investigating are subtle yet uncanny. It is also a testimony of Cartwright’s artistry that he seamlessly introduces the only truly fictional element—the romantic interests of the Prussian aristocrat and Jewish Don—in a novel teeming with historical actualities. At times, though, he appears to stray away from facts; or perhaps his interpretation of certain crucial events is different from that of von trot and Berlin’s common friends. Cartwright indicates in the novel that Mendel warns Frankfurter and other influential Americans that von Gottenberg’s motives were suspect and that he was not to be trusted. All the available evidence suggests that in real life it was not Berlin but his fellow Oxford Don Cecil Maurice Bowra who warned the Americans about von Trott. (Bowra continued to view von Trott as a Nazi and was unmoved when the news reached Oxford of von Trott’s hanging. In later life Bowra expressed bitter remorse for his treatment of von Trott.) At other times, Cartwright sets out on riveting historical what-ifs, which add to the intrigue. Conrad Senior is convinced that a film of von Gottenberg’s execution exists. In real life, von Trott was executed eleven days after his fellow conspirators, and it is unlikely that his execution was filmed. Gestapo kept him alive for a variety of reasons: aware of his foreign contacts they wanted to extract more information and possible wider ramifications of the plot; it is also possible that some in the SS might have wanted to keep him alive in order to buy their way out when Germany lost the war—for, surely, by then all except the gullible and the deluded must have known that they were staring down the abyss of defeat.

Cartwright is an astute, if acerbic, observer of the human quirks and peculiarities, which makes this novel an especial pleasure to read. Conrad Senior’s observations and views on life, and his relentless insight into human ambiguities may be sardonic, but they are not flippant or mocking. This is an erudite, deeply thoughtful novel with a serious message: humans are the authors of their own lives. As one reads the account of von Grottenberg/ von Trott’s last days, and his epic composure at the trial, one is left with the feeling that it could not have turned out any other way. von Gottenberg / von Trott could have stayed back in England instead of returning to Germany. He did not. He rejected the safe option which would certainly have seen him through the war to the comfortable obscurity in the post-war Germany; and instead embarked upon a path which he must have known, as the war progressed, could only have one outcome.

Victa placet mihi causa—albeit lost the cause does please me—wrote Lucanus almost two millennia ago. History, however, the hardhearted mistress she is, has no time for causa victa, and is excessively fond of causa victrix. That, perhaps, is the reason why the German resistance to Adolf Hitler, which culminated in the July 1944 bomb plot, has not been accorded its rightful place in history; and the persons involved, the plotters, are forgotten names; they are the unsung heroes. Justin Cartwright, in this highly accomplished novel, has made a persuasive case for causa victa. Poignant, elegiac, soulful and profoundly moving, The Song Before It Is Sung is a triumph.

Books Read In 2008

When 2008 began, I made the following resolutions:

1. I would read at least fifty books.
2. Of these fifty, at least ten would be non-fiction books.
3. I would read Pride and Prejudice.

I have always enjoyed reading fiction, and, while I make no apologies for preferring fiction to non-fiction—I have always thought that fiction demands more creativity—my non-fiction reading is not up to scratch. I added the third resolution to the list because I was getting fed up with the constant badgering to which I was being subjected by a friend who cannot believe that I have not read one of the greatest novels written in English. My attempts to placate him on this matter—‘I do not much go for pre-twentieth century fiction, and, with the exception of Hard Times, have not read any nineteenth century fiction’; ‘I do not think I would find the tale of an old crone trying to marry off her daughters by giving as little dowry as possible engrossing, however well written’; ‘There is no call for him criticising my reading habits seeing as he reads no more than ten books in a year (two of which are Harry Potter)’— brought no joy. In the end, just to shut him up, I added Pride and Prejudice to my reading list for 2008.

Of the three objectives, I fulfilled one, the first one. The remaining two, sadly, will have to be carried forward to 2009.

Below is the list of the books I read in 2008.

Fiction

1. An Underachiever’s Diary (Benjamin Anastas)
2. The Bottle Factory Outing (Beryl Bainbridge)
3. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
4. Jeeves in the Offing (P.G. Wodehouse)
5. London Observed (Doris Lessing)
6. And Where Were You, Adam (Heinrich Boll)
7. Aunts Are No Gentlemen (P.G. Wodehouse)
8. Jake’s Thing (Kingsley Amis)
9. On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan)
10. House of Meetings (Martin Amis)
11. Reader, I Married Him (Michelle Roberts)
12. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Alan Sillitoe)
13. The Giles Waring Haters’ Club (Tim Dowling)
14. Call It Sleep (Henry Roth)
15. Merde Happens (Stephen Clarke)
16. Bluebeard (Max Frisch)
17. Slam (Nick Hornby)
18. Ralph’s Party (Lisa Jewell)
19. Before She Met Me (Julian Barnes)
20. Accidental Woman (Jonathan Coe)
21. A Woman of My Age (Nina Bawden)
22. Children of the Revolution (Dinaw Mengestu)
23. Some Tame Gazelle (Barbara Pym)
24. The Playroom (Olivia Manning)
25. Crome Yellow (Aldous Huxley)
26. Gathering (Anne Enright)
27. Laughter in the Dark (Vladimir Nabokov)
28. Model Behaviour (Jay McInerney)
29. My Revolutions (Hari Kunzru)
30. The Masters (C.P Snow)
31. Girl with Green Eyes (Edna O’Brien)
32. Road to Wellville (T.C. Boyle)
33. To the North (Elizabeth Bowen)
34. The Song Before It Is Sung (Justin Cartwright)
35. Honey for the Bears (Anthony Burgess)
36. The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett)
37. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
38. Blaming (Elizabeth Taylor)
39. Coming from Behind (Howard Jacobson)
40. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)
41. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (Liz Jensen)
42. Tomorrow (Graham Swift)
43. The Kite Runner (Khalid Hosseini)
44. Terrorist (John Updike)

Non-fiction

1. Let’s Kill Gandhi (Tushar Gandhi)
2. Holy Cow! (Sarah Macdonald)
3. Mao The Unknown Story (Jung Chang & Jon Halliday)
4. My Invented Country (Isabel Allende)
5. Mistress’s Daughter (A.M. Homes)
6. The Fishes Come Home to Roost (Rachael Manija Brown)
7. After the Wall (Jana Hensel)
8. Among the Believers (V.S. Naipaul)
9. Literary Occasions (V.S. Naipaul)


A total of 53 books—one more than the number I read in 2007. The non-fiction, while it fell one short of the requisite number, was, still, an improvement over the number in 2007 (five). And, while I did not get round to reading Pride and Prejudice—I tried, I assure you; however, every time I picked up the edition in my collection, with Kira Knightley’s sickly, anorexic face on its front, I had the strange sensation of life-force sapping, and, it was all I could do to put the Jane Austin masterpiece back on the shelf and totter out of the library gasping for breath—it was not supplanted by another nineteenth century fiction, say, David Copperfield (which has also been on my ‘to read’ list); I did not read any nineteenth century fiction. It has been suggested that I should buy a different edition of Pride and Prejudice, preferably one which does not have Kira Knightley adorning its front. Let’s see.

There are many authors in the list above whom I read for the first time. In the non-fiction category, with the exception of Naipaul and Allende, I had not read the works of any of the authors (and I had read only the novels of Allende), although, as far as I am aware, Gandhi’s, Macdonald’s, Brown’s and Hensel’s literary outputs do not (yet) extend beyond the books I have read.

In the fiction category, there were nineteen authors– Benjamin Anastas, Michelle Roberts, Alan Sillitoe, Tim Dowling, Henry Roth, Max Frisch, Lisa Jewell, Dinaw Mengestu, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Anne Enright, C.P Snow, Edna O’Brien, T.C. Boyle, Alan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Yates, Liz Jensen, Khalid Hosseini—whom I read for the first time. I must admit to being stumped—to use that quaint English expression (according to Jeffrey Archer, who, surely, is as English as they come)—Lisa Jewell’s Ralph’s Party in this list. Mind you, I have nothing against the mother-of-two, who decided to try her hand at writing after she was made redundant from her job as a secretary, and Ralph’s Party, as far as I can recall, is an easy-to-read-on-the-toilet type of books which do not make undue demands on your intellectual capacity; it is just that I read such books only when I am stuck mid-air for in excess of eight hours (and even then I generally read Jeffrey Archer). In other words, life is too short to read books whose genres are not to your taste. (I use the expression ‘Life is too short to . . .' quite often; I find it serves a useful purpose; it seeks to give the impression that while you are ignorant, you are ignorant by choice.)

I read Updike after a long time. The last novel of Updike I had read was Seek My Face, a gimmicky, unsubstantial and unreadable novel, which did nothing to reassure me that Updike’s creativity was not in terminal decline. While Terrorist shows glimpses of Updike’s former linguistic brilliance and is nicely paced, the premise, like the protagonist, is unconvincing, and the novel, which offers no real insight as to why an educated, academically bright Muslim boy turns to violence, is ultimately disappointing.

Kite Runner is written by the Americanized Afghan writer Khalid Hosseini, who, apparently, is a doctor by profession. The novel was a commercial success and was made into a film. It is a formulaic, melodramatic, over-the-top, predictable, and not very subtle novel, which divides the world rather neatly into simplistic categories.

Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle cannot be more different from The Kite Runner, both in its subject matter and narrative style. This comedy of manners is a quintessentially English novel, rich in subtlety-it is not the kind of novel that would make you laugh out loud, but will bring a smile to your face. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved has been collecting dust on my shelf for the last fourteen years, although I have read some other novels of the 1993 Nobel Laureate, such as Jazz and The Song of Solomon. I finally read Beloved (which won the 1987 Pulitzer) after I attended a literary programme in which Morrison read from her most recent novel— a prequel to Beloved. I am glad I read Beloved, which, despite some annoying (and unnecessary) gimmicks, is a very good novel—probably not my most favourite Morrison novel, but well worth a read.

Before She Met Me is an early novel of Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers. It tells the story of the modern day ‘Othello Syndrome’. It is a well-researched book, embelished by Barne’s trademark wit. The end stuns you as much for its violence as for unexpectedness. Not perhaps Barnes’s best, but well worth a read.

Crome Yellow, a satire on the upper-class English (and their affectations) in the 1920s, is Aldous Huxley’s debut novel, but you would not think so, so assured is his style.

Richard Yate’s Revolutionary Road was on my ‘to be read’ list for years. Yate’s wry, yet compassionate, novel of hopes (and their betrayals) of a middle-class American family,as it hurtles towards tragedy, is a great work of art. I will have to read other novels of this underrated genius.

The Masters is said to be the best of C.P. Snow’s ‘Lewis Eliot’ sequence of novels; it is also the book that has worn well. C.P. Snow’s tale of the intrigues and machinations of the election of the master of a college in Cambridge is remarkable as much for the great skill with which its key characters are drawn as for its superb, Dickensenian prose.

Road to Welville, the exotically named T Corghessan Boyel’s tale of John Harvey Kellog, the creator of Kellog’s cornflakes, is a riot. Boyle’s linguistic brilliance adds to the pleasure of reading. I shall be reading more of T.C. Boyle in the coming years.

If linguistic pyrotechnics get you what the Italians would call arrapato, then you should not miss Coming from Behind, Howard Jacobson’s debut novel. The plot, such as it is, is incidental; the novel is a vehicle for Jacobson to dazzle you with his crackling prose and wit. Jacobson is a great comic talent, sadly underrated.

Accidental Woman is the debut novel of Jonathan Coe, one of my favourite novelists. While it lacks the finesse of Coe’s later works and does not quite seem able to make up its mind which genre it wants to belong to, there is enough evidence in this slight (in respect of volume, not substance) novel the awesome talent Coe was going to turn out to be.

Alan Benet’s The Uncommon Reader is a sheer pleasure to read; this urbane and erudite novella about reading and its manifold delights can be enjoyed at many levels.

Call It Sleep is a multifaceted, at times deeply moving, novel of the Jewish imigrant life at the turn of the last but one century that I found remarkable as much for its black humour as for its innovative use of language. The poignancy is increased further when you learn of the deeply troubled childhood of Henry Roth, the inspiration for this autobigraphical novel.

Max Frisch's Blubeard was the only translated fiction I read in 2008. Frisch, whose better known translated works include I am Not Stiller and Homo Faber, has, in Bluebeard (the eponymous hero of Perrault's fairy tale), created a fascinating way of exploring old truths.

Of the nine non-fiction books I read in 2008, I shall mention three: Mao, the Untold Story is an extensively researched, meticulously referenced, eight hundred pages behemoth, which the Commuist regime in China dare not allow to be published. In seventy chapters Chang and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, trace Mao's life from his birth to death and, in the process, shatter every myth associated with the father of the People's republic of China. It is a bombshell of a book. Rachael Brown's All the Fishes Come Home to Roost is an engrossing, bittersweet account of the five years she spent as a pre-adolescent in the ashram of an Indian guru, Meher Baba, of whom her parents were disciples, in the backwaters of India. In an ironic, witty, humane, and genuinely affecting style Brown recounts the less-than-wholesome years she spent in the sleepy town of Ahmadnagar. V.S. Naipaul has the (undeserved) reputation of being anti-Muslim. Among the Believers, first publsihed in 1979, is Naipaul's account of his travels through Islamic countries of Iran, Pakistan, Indonasia and Malaysia. Written with his customary acerbity and relentless pursuit of ugly reality lurking underneath the patina of religious sohistry, the book is eerily prophetic.

My top three novels of 2008: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Alan Sillitoe), Jake's Thing (KIngsley Amis), and The Song Before It Is Sung (Justin Cartwright). I have reviewed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning on the blog, and shall review the other two in due course.

Chronicles of A Dyspeptic Man: Celebrity Chefs

You are not a fan of Christmas. This Christmas, you anticipate, will be subdued what with the credit crunch. The looming recession, predicted to worsen in the New Year, will put a damper on people’s enthusiasm, and they will waste not as much money on unnecessary trinkets, unhealthy food, sweets guaranteed to rot your teeth, and alcohol guaranteed to clog your arteries, as they otherwise would. You would not be eager to spend money buying useless presents for relatives you do not like (and who probably hate you in turn) for Christmas when you are not sure you would have a job in the New year.

Of the many things that irritate you about Christmas the top spot ought to go to the festive cookery programmes. There is, for example, this implausibly voluptuous (according to some tabloids) celebrity chef, married to an implausibly wealthy (second) husband, living in an implausibly glamorous house (the décor of which is implausibly tacky), preparing morsels of implausibly bland food, tossing her hair, pouting seductively, fluttering her eyelids and smiling coquettishly at the camera, contriving to position her body in a way that she hopes would hide her fat arse, licking cream and butter off her fingers in a manner that is explicitly suggestive of oral sex, it is a wonder you do not get a hard on. Could it be because the woman is not so much voluptuous as fat, and wears her make-up that makes her look like an RTA victim? You recently watched one of her Christmas specials—just to reassure yourself that the woman still had a fat arse and was more insincere than a worm—where she spent fifteen minutes preparing chocolate bonbons which looked (and probably tasted) like dark brown turd, on which she poured droplets of viscous white chocolate sauce that looked like cum. So much for her presentation skills: a big blob of bodily fluid balanced on a mound of bodily waste. She then proceeded to suck on to a bonbon, as though it was sweet-tasting testicles, making repulsive noises, screwing her eyes shut, attempting to arrange her facial muscles in a way that she obviously thought was sexy and gave a verisimilitude of an orgasm. After a few seconds she swallowed the muck, heaved an exaggerated sigh and proclaimed to the camera (in a voice that was so husky and deep, it probably caused the glassware in the kitchen to tremble) that it was ‘deeleeecious.’

Then there is this other irritating so-and-so, the blond mushmouth with gaps in his teeth wide enough to drive a tractor through, and a fat tongue. He is probably thirty, looks like he is twenty, behaves and speaks like a fifteen year old with Down’s Syndrome, and, between him and his annoying wife (whom he refers to with a silly diminutive and who has written an unreadable book on how to cope with motherhood), the two probably have a combined IQ of a cockroach. You have watched him prancing about in his Christmas Special, talking non-stop, inanely, adding dollops of butter into everything, making horrid concoctions of poisonous vegetables, anchovies and other vile things you do not think should be legal, and carving turkey as though he is performing skull-base surgery. In the last few years he has come all over like a rash, replacing, you have to admit, some equally irritating television chefs—for example, the one with the improbable hair (which exploded upwards from his skull in hundreds of glistening spikes and which he touched from time to time in the middle of his cooking with his fingertips, not, obviously, in an effort to smooth it, but rather in the furtive, half-conscious manner an adolescent might touch his pimples, just to make sure that the horrible thing was still there), or the six feet bald bastard with a permanently plastered grin on his face and about six pounds of muscle between his ears. He, the blonde cretin, when he first started, operated from a flat in London. He had an overfriendly, over-informal style, and talked asininely, repeating a few stock-words, his vocabulary probably comprising no more than two hundred words. His recipes, like him, had no class or taste, and some of his pukka dishes were so vile, you would not serve them to a dog. He has come a long way since those humble beginning, and, perhaps, is not as daft as that, all appearances to the contrary. Somewhere underneath that pallid mug, without any obvious evidence of intelligence, is a cunning mind at work, conjuring up new ways to gain publicity and fill his coffers. He is worth several millions and lives on a sprawling estate somewhere in Suffolk (where he lovingly rears chickens and geese, which he then lovingly massacres; and chunters with men with scraggly beards who look like idiots in search of villages and are as clumsy and inarticulate as he); he has learnt a few more words such as ‘obviously’ and ‘furthermore’ (although you expect him at any time to say ‘fart’ or ‘belly-button’); but he still has no class and his food is as rotten as ever. He launched a campaign a few months ago, making a ‘stinging attack’ on the nation’s ‘booze and pies’ culture, attracting, in the process a lot of publicity and headlines. In your considered opinion, it is about time someone made a stinging attack on this talentless publicity-monger, preferably with a baseball bat. The blabbermouth with his nannying ways has become a self-appointed, self-inflicted campaigner for healthy meals and livestock welfare. He advocates nurturing the chickens, say, with a lot of love and care—‘Oh! Aren’t they cute? Oh! They are so cute!—before killing, roasting and eating them. His method of getting the nation to eat healthily is to describe his fellow compatriots as drunken laggards who do not know the difference between good and bad food, and go on anti-obesity scaremongering, making hysterical, low-level television programmes in which he pours slithery liquid on fat women allegedly to represent all the fat they are consuming. Apart from being in poor taste, it is a bit rich coming from him, seeing as his paunch rivals that of a pregnant woman in mid trimester. It could not be richer if he weighed it down with gallons of double cream he adds to his yucky puddings. However, it is almost as rich as his hypocritical hectoring on behalf of poor farmers who, he bemoans, are being fleeced by the supermarkets, although he has no qualms about trousering 1.2 million pounds a year one them pays him to endorse their products. His campaign for healthy meals in schools may have won him admirers amongst champagne socialists who view the plebs as recondite collection of semiliterate, untrustworthy, dangerous individuals, their brains addled by alcohol, fatty food and fizzy drinks, who need to be kept in check so that the rest of us can live in peace, but his ‘healthy school-dinners, high in nutritional value’ were given a resounding thumbs down by the school children: in some parts of the country the number of children opting for ‘healthy’ school dinners fell as much as 75%. They would rather have Turkey Twizzlers than the tasteless, uneatable muck he dishes out. When will this precious little sod realise that adding any which herb you happen to lay your hands on to the dish you are preparing does not make it tasty? It may well be that the nation needs to eat healthily; what the nation most certainly does not need is a prattling half-wit lecturing them about it and going on silly crusades.

Finally, there is the foul-mouthed one. He thinks he invented the F word. Anything that can be faintly connected to ‘cultivated’, ‘decent’ or ‘nice’ is an anathema to him. You do not know whether to roll on the floor with laughter or cover your eyes in embarrassment as you watch this middle aged man, with a face that has a close resemblance to a dried prune, plucking a turkey (‘I still pluck my own fucking turkey, mate’) and acting as if he is in Baghdad. Looking at him you cannot but wonder for how long, boy and a man, he has tried to be insensitive and ill-bred, to hold his own amongst glowering boys and saturnine men whose real or (more probably) imagined jeers have blighted his childhood. He revels in spats; nothing gets his adrenaline going like a squabble that gives him the opportunity of macho posturing, be they his one time mentor (whose arse he vacuum-cleaned when he needed them) or former protégée who threatened to outshine him. He likes to talk about his troubled past, his unhappy childhood, the broken home he comes from . . . yada yada yada . . . all of which, whether true or not (you do not really care), is recounted with the aim of adding to the cloudy radiance he has carefully cultivated around him over the years. He arrived on the scene around the same time as the blonde cretin, but he pursued a different strategy. Whereas the blonde cretin was all luvy duvy and made middle-aged housewives have thoughts they would not admit to, the walnut-faced interloper fostered a macho man image with a fly-on-the wall documentary—made possible by the half a million largesse he received from a father-in-law whose wealth was as filthy as his, the foul-mouthed-one’s, mouth (his perk for putting up with the anorexic daughter of the multi-mllionaire)— in which he continuously cussed and uttered profanities and bullied his staff. All of this might just have been bearable if his recipes were any good. They were not; they were as foul as his language. Since then he has opened restaurants, made countless cookery shows (in which he has found, incredible as it may seem, participants, many of them professional chefs, willing to bear his insults and offensive language on national television) and published glossy cookery books (all of which are only of use the morning after you have partaken unwise portions of extra hot vindaloo the night before and have run out of toilet paper). He probably thinks he is witty; but his idea of wit is to make lewd jokes about spotted dick and sexist, chauvinistic comments about a fellow chef who, the old boiler she might be, possesses one thing this arrogant faker will never have: class. He is a craggy-faced, overbearing twat who would not recognize subtlety (or humility) if it hit him in the face; who is just a jumped up dinner lady with grossly hyperinflated (as inflated as the silicon-enhanced breasts of his mistress) sense of self-worth (how much skill is required to boil cabbages and put meat in the oven?); who, if he managed to take his head out of his rectum and look around, would realise that shouting in a pretend macho way while stirring lamb casserole is just pathetic, and, more importantly, does not make good television—it is about as enjoyable as your tooth being pulled out without a local anaesthetic by a dentist who has had lots of onions and garlic for lunch.

Your Christmas wish is that all three of the above, who have no discernible talent or beneficial use, do us a favour and stop hogging primetime television.

Book of the Month: The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett)

Queen Elizabeth (the second) of Great Britain, during her long rein that will soon enter its sixtieth year, has become an indelible part of the British society. Figurehead she may be—being reduced to read out prepared speeches when the parliament opens and throw garden parties for visiting dignitaries—the quietly dignified, taciturn old woman is regarded with something approaching deep affection by her ‘subjects'.

How does the queen spend her time? What are her hobbies? If she finds any leisure time from her onerous duties of opening Old People’s Homes and sitting for portraits, what does she do with it? Does she like reading books, for example? Well known for her exotic hats and the love of horses and her corgis, the queen does not have the reputation of being an avid reader. It would be fair to conclude, on the basis of published biographies, that the queen does not have an entrain for books (unless, perhaps, they are horse-related). But what if the septuagenarian queen develops a penchant for books? Alan Bennett, an institution in himself in British literature, in an entertaining and quirky novella—at more than hundred pages it is not quite a short story, but neither is it a long short story as some have oxymoronically chosen to describe it—muses on this delightful what-if. The queen is the uncommon reader (Bennett allowing himself a bit of play on words in the novella’s title).

One day, led by her corgis, the queen discovers, on one side of the palace grounds, the City of Westminster travelling library, and inside it, a not-very-pretty scullion, who is a voracious reader of photography books and homosexual authors. Incredibly, the ginger-haired, acne-ridden adolescent becomes the queen’s literary cicerone, and, beginning with a novel of Ivy Compton-Burnette—‘I made her a dame’ the queen responds apropos de rien when the librarian informs her that her choice of author is not very popular these days—the queen starts her literary odyssey that takes her through works of Henry James, Beckett, Proust, Balzac, Genet, Turgenev, Trollop, and Hardy to name just a few. The queen’s newfangled enthusiasm for reading does not go unnoticed, and, amongst the equerries, is a cause for concern. The concern is tinged with annoyance and envy when Norman, the kitchen-boy, is lifted from his lowly position and promoted as the Royal literary advisor. The Queen’s private secretary, Sir Kevin Scatchard, who is from New Zeeland (and a source of gentle raillery in the novella) and who takes himself and his job a little too seriously, gets concerned when the Queen begins to lag behind, indeed seems uninterested in, her duties—a ride on a supertram, a ukulele concert, a tour round a cheese factory—and the less-than-amused prime-minister’s less-than-amused special advisor contacts him to complain that that Sir Kevin’s employer had begun lending his employer books on history of Persia and expected him to read them. (When Sir Kevin feebly responds that Her Majesty likes reading, the special advisor retorts that he likes getting his dick sucked, but he does not make the prime-minister do it). Sir Kevin manages to get rid of the troublemaker Norman when the queen is on a tour of Canada: he is dispatched to the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, to study English; but his absence has no impact on the queen’s new-found love. Indeed, so engrossed is she in her pursuits that she appears to her equerries forgetful and absent-minded, raising the spectre of Alzheimer’s disease. In desperation Sir Kevin turns to Sir Claude Pollington, ‘a safe pair of hands’, who has served loyally generations of Royals (beginning with the queen’s grandfather George V), and who has been working, for the past several decades on his memoirs, tentatively titled Drudgery divine (he has managed to write a couple of paragraphs). The vicenarian Sir Claude, in clutches of senility, agrees to remind the queen of her duties, and ends up giving the queen an advice that only adds to Sir Kevin’s headache: he suggests that the queen should write. As the novella progresses, the twists in the story appear to expand exponentially. Whether the finale of the novella—it can’t be revealed here given its nature—is an anticlimax or a bombshell (as Sue Macgregor on BBC Radio 4 described it) is a matter of opinion; what cannot be denied is that it catches the reader by surprise.

The Uncommon Reader is a devilishly clever novella that can be enjoyed at several levels. For the most part, it proceeds at a gentle pace, wheeled along by Bennett’s gentle, dead-pan, at times self-deprecating, yet tongue-in-cheek humour—Bennett has several gentle digs at the monarchy without ever attempting to mock or humiliate—and deceptively simple prose. At times, though, Bennett, without much warning, shifts gears and the narrative becomes a boisterous slapstick that has the readers in stitches (Sir Kevin’s meeting with Sir Claude and Sir Claude’s meeting with the queen are cases in point). Bennet’s work is always distinguished by mischievous wit, poignancy, and odd characters; and The Uncommon Reader is no exception. However, it is not just a quirky, comic tale; it is also a book about reading books (the novella contains references to many authors (both present and past) and famous literary characters; it is more than just a book about reading books—it is an ode to reading and its everlasting delights. It is a celebration of reading itself, an exploration of how reading can profoundly influence and change one’s outlook and the way one relates to the world—the queen, who, at the beginning reminds Norman, somewhat sententiously, that ‘one has a duty to find out what people are like’, says, later, to sir Kevin: ‘One reads for pleasure; it is not a public duty.’ As the queen transforms—at one point in the novella, the queen, in conversation with the vice-chancellor and the professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, remarks that reading softens a person up, while writing does the reverse—so does the reader.

The Uncommon Reader is a superb novella. Grab it on a rainy day when you are feeling glum. It will bring joy to your existence.

Are American Authors Insular?

Below is a list of the Nobel laureates in literature in the past fifteen years.

2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
2007 - Doris Lessing
2006 - Orhan Pamuk
2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 – Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J. M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertész
2001 - V. S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Günter Grass
1998 - José Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe

Is there anything about the list that thrusts into your attention? Here is a clue:

2008 winner—Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio— is French.

2007 winner—Doris Lessing—is of English ancestry: born in Iran, raised in what was then Rhodesia, she lives in the United Kingdom and is a British citizen.

2006 winer—Orhan Pamuk—is Turkish. He is not exactly Mr. Popular in Turkey for his views about Turkey’s treatment of Armenians around the time of the First World War.

2005 winner—Harold Pinter—is English, and lives in the UK.

2004 winner—Elfriede Jelinek—is Austrian.

2003 winner—J.M. Coetzee—is a South African of European ancestry; he now lives in Australia.

2002 winner—Imre Kertesz—is Hungarian.

2001 winner—V.S. Naipaul is of Indian ancestry; he was born in Trinidad; he came to England when he was 18 and has lived in that country all his life. He is a British citizen.

2000 winner—Gao Xingjian—was born in China, but has lived in France for many years, in exile. Like Pamuk, he has incurred the wrath of the government of his parent country because of his controversial political views.

1999 winner—Gunter Grass—is German.

1998 winner—Jose Saramago—is Portuguese.

1997 winner—Dario Fo—is Italian.

1996 winner—Wislawa Szymborska—is Polish.

1995 winner—Seamus Heaney—is Irish

1994 winner—Kenzaburo Oe—is Japanese. He lives in Japan.

Has the penny dropped? It has? Good! So you have noticed that there are rather a lot of European authors lining up the list. All except one of the Nobel winners in the past fifteen years either are Europeans or have European connection. Kenzaburo Oe, who won more than a decade ago, is the only one amongst these worthies who has no European connection. Surprised? What is not so surprising is that men outnumber women by a ratio of one to four.

Let us concentrate a bit on the preponderance of European authors among the Nobel winners in the past fifteen years, or, the relative paucity of writers from other parts of the world, if you prefer to look at it from a different angle. There are not many American authors in this list; in fact, there is none. Does it matter? Probably no more than the fact that African, Australian, Russian, Indian, Chinese, and Latin American writers are also conspicuous by their absence. For the record, the last Australian author to win the Nobel was Patrick White, in 1973 (and he was a naturalised Australian, having been born and bred in England); the last Latin American was Octavio Paz, a Mexican, who won in 1990; and the last African was the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, in 1986. Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) is the last author, to date, from the Middle East to win the one million dollar (or is it euro now?), in 1988. No Russian author has been awarded the Nobel after 1970 (when Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who, as it happened, was living in exile in the USA, won it, as much for his literary talent as for his anti-Soviet stance ). The last (and to date the only) time an Indian hit the literary jackpot was almost a century ago, when the poet Rabindranath Tagore (who holds the distinction of having his poems chosen by two countries—India in 1947 and Bangla Desh in 1971—as their national anthems), enthusiastically promoted by W.B. Yeats (who won the award himself ten years later), won it; and, astonishing as it may seem, no Chinese has been deemed good enough to merit it. What about Naipaul and Xingjian, I hear you asking. While it is true that Naipaul is of Indian ancestry (which he acknowledged in his Nobel acceptance speech) and has written his celebrated (and controversial) trilogy on India, he was not born in India, neither has he lived in the land of his ancestors. Born in the Indian community in Trinidad, Naipaul has lived all his adult life in England, and been a British citizen for decades. Rudyard Kipling, the first British writer to win the Nobel, was probably more Indian than Naipaul—he was born in Bombay and lived in India for while (and no one will make the mistake of considering the Imperialist Kipling, who, like many other European Nobel Laureates, has sunk into well-deserved obscurity, Indian). Xinjiang, as we shall see later, is a persona non grata in China; he has lived in exile in France for more than twenty years, and is a French (albeit naturalized) citizen.

Indeed, if one looks at the 101-year history of the Nobel Prize in literature and its winners, only thirty-one are from outside of Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic. If anything, the Nobel has become more global in the past sixty years; in the first fifty years of the award, only five were outside of Europe and Scandinavia. Of the thirty-one non-European authors who have been awarded the Nobel, ten—almost one third— are Americans. (Of the ten, at least three were naturalised Americans including Joseph Brodsky, who, like Xingjian, had left his home country, the USSR, for political reasons.)

Last year, after Doris Lessing won the Nobel, the whole raft her novels, several of which were out of print for years, were re-circulated, reminding the buyers, in bold letters, that the author was the winner of the Nobel Prize. Therefore, presumably, winning the award, in addition to the manna attached to it, also boosts the sales of the winner’s books. However, it is not just that. Over the decades, winning the Nobel has somehow come to represent the acme of a writer’s career. Almost all the novels of V.S. Naipaul, published before his Nobel, made it a point to mention that he had won all the literary awards except the Nobel. It obviously mattered to Naipaul that the award had eluded him.

The Nobel has become controversial for a number of reasons. In 2001 V.S. Naipaul became the first British author in almost twenty years—after William Golding, who was awarded the prize in 1983—to be awarded with what many think has become a political award. Some suggested at the time that Naipaul—considered by many to be the finest British author writing in English—was presented the award not so much for his awesome literary output over the years—many are of the view that Sir Vidya should have won years ago—as for his alleged anti-Islamic views (his two travelogues—Among the Believers and its sequel, Beyond Belief -are deemed by those (who are always on the lookout for evidence that will confirm their prejudices) to be an averment of Naipaul’s anti-Muslim prejudice) which became fashionable again in the West on the backdrop of anti-Muslim sentiments sweeping through Europe and the Western world after September 11. A year before Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, a till then little-known Chinese author (but not just that; he is also a dramatist, critic and artist), who had been living in exile in France since the late 1980s (he has held French citizenship since 1998), and whose work in China apparently came to a halt after he wrote a play against the backdrop of what is referred to in the Western media as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese were not amused and dubbed the award a political manoeuvre, which it probably was. (The Chinese, it has to be said, were somewhat ungracious, and dropped oblique hints that Xingjian was probably not a Nobel material, and would not have won it but for the political angle.) The fact that one Goran Malamquist, who has translated and produced Xingjian’s plays in Stockholm, is on the panel that makes the selection of Nobel Laureates, may also have helped Xingjian. In 2005, Orhan Pamuk, the outspoken Turkish author, incurred the wrath of the Turkish government and many Turkish nationalists by his comments about what Turkey refuses to acknowledge, officially, the Armenian genocide of the 1915 and Turkey’s treatment of the Kurdish separatists. He was taken to courts for insulting Turkishness and, had he been found guilty, would have faced a jail-sentence. Overnight Pamuk became the darling of the Western and European media which became self-righteously indignant over the affair—Salman Rushdie railed against the oppression of free speech in Turkey—and, lo and behold, the very next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Coincidence? I think not. This disposition of the Nobel committees is not new, however. Nobel committees, over decades, seem to have taken a le malin plaisir in awarding the prize to rebel authors emerging from other, non-European / non-Western, societies and cultures which, or the regimes ruling over these cultures, are deemed to be at odds with the European / Western value systems. These winners—be it Bunin or Solzhenistyn or Brodsky—at the time the honour was bestowed upon them—were living in the West, in exile. (This augurs well for Kundera and Llohsa.)

It should, therefore, not be excessively surprising that the Russians and the Chinese and the Turks have found themselves in less than fulsome agreement with the Nobel committees over their choices. Now, bizarrely enough, the American literati find themselves in a state of agitation—somewhere between dudgeon and umbrage—over the decisions of the Nobel selection committee, for very different reasons. Of late, American authors, as mentioned earlier, are conspicuous by their absence in the list of Nobel winners. Now their worst suspicions are confirmed. Horace Engdahl, the top member of the award jury for the Nobel Prize for Literature, has delivered his judgment. American authors, Engdahl has declared, are too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. ‘The US,’ Horace has discovered, ‘is too isolated; too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. This ignorance is restraining.’ So the Swedish dude (as I believe Americans like to refer to male adults of different age groups) has puked all over the smorgasboard (if you allow me to mix my metaphors) of American literature, and the NY Mag hacks are very unhappy on behalf of Philip Roth and John Updike, whose chances of winning the Nobel, in light of Engdhal’s helpful comments, seem to be about as good as the second coming of Christ (which is particularly sad for Updike, who, by dint of having produced his best work forty years ago and being old—like Pinter and Lessing—, one would have thought, qualifies for it). Long lists of contemporary great American authors few have heard of (outside of America)are produced, accompanied by the penetrating observation that theEuropean Nobel winners are virtually unknown outside of Europe. All of which, to some, may appear as avowing what Engdhal has (rightly or wrongly) accused them of. Of course, we are insular; that is what makes us great. (And, if you think that it is a bit like saying, of course, ocean is wet, you would not be the only one.)

Let’s have a look at Engdhal’s condemnation of American literature—because that is what it is; Engdhal, when he made these remarks was animadverting. He says that the US is too isolated, too insular. Not having read very many US authors I do not know what to make of what sounds like a sweeping generalisation. I would say that most authors educe their subject matter from the environs they know best; and, for most of us the environs we know best are the ones in which we live. If one tries to write about cultures we do not have a firsthand experience of, would it ring true? David Gutterson made this point, albeit indirectly, in a literary festival. When asked what he had to say to Engdhal’s charge that American authors are insular, he answered, quite unapologetically, that he put his hand up to the charge; he wrote about things he felt comfortable about. Naipaul and Lessing, the two recent British Nobel Laureates, have written about different cultures, but then they had the experience of living in and travelling through different cultures, and that is why, perhaps, their stories ring true. (It is also true that both of them have produced high quality work that has universal significance.

It is plain daft to assume that works which are local (in the sense that they are geographically specific) are ipso facto lacking in universal relevance. Take for example the works of the 2002 Nobel winner Imre Kertesz. Some of Kertesz’s greatest fictional output is closely linked to his own experience in the German (Nazi) concentration camps. Kertesz would not have been able to write Sorstalanság (translated into English as Fatelessness) if he had not survived Auschwitz. Fatelessness, a work of fiction, is an intensely personal account of an adolescent boy who goes through the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Although resolutely specific in its attentions, the Nobel jurors, very appropriately, recognized the universal themes emerging from Kertesz’s narratives, and awarded him the Nobel for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history. Therefore, it is not as though the Nobel Jurors are incapable of looking beyond the immediacy of geographical location in which the narrative is set. So, when Engdhal accuses of American writers of insularity, he is suggesting that he cannot find anything of significance in the writings of American authors that touches the wider human condition. This is nonsense. Even those, who have read only the internationally acclaimed American writers—Roth, Ford, and McCarthy to name just three whose writing clearly transcends national boundaries—, will find his assertion hard to swallow. To return to the point David Gutterson made, it is absurd to consider that a ‘provincial’ novel is somehow less elevated than a ‘universal’ novel. I have enjoyed many an American novel for their unabashed Americanness than those with universal pretensions. A great novel—Jonathan Franzen’s Correction is a case in point—always finds its way to the wider human condition via the specific. The Great Russian writers of the twentieth century—Pasternak and Sholokhov, who are widely known outside of Russia—and they both were awarded the Nobel—wrote books deeply rooted in their cultural and social milieu.

Engdhal’s other accusation is that Americans do not translate enough; one assumes that the non-English works Engdhal has in mind are European. I should doubt very much whether Engdhal is bothered whether the Americans are translating enough non-European writers. The winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the thirteenth Frenchman to get the accolade and first since 1985 (if one excludes Xingjian), is an author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization, according to the Nobel Committee. While the English language readers have no reason to doubt the judgment of the Nobel Jurors—apparently Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is a well known and respected literary figure in France—they are, at present not in a position to draw their independent conclusions about the merits of the Nobel Laureate, because his works have not been available in the UK, the only English-speaking country in Europe. Therefore, America is not only English speaking that does not translate enough.

It is also interesting that Engdhal picked out American literature for his criticism and proffered his wisdom as to why no American writer has won the Nobel for more than a decade, when it is not only that continent but almost all other parts of the world, except Europe, have been ignored. Americans are not the only ones subjected to Engdhal’s sweeping generalisations. He dishes out a different set of prejudice against non-Western cultures. This is what he has to say about them: ‘Europe respects the independence of literature and can serve as a safe haven. Very many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe, because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death. It is dangerous to be an author in big parts of Asia and Africa.’ Like all irrational biases, there is a kernel of truth in this, but what Engdhal does is he takes it as a springboard and makes outrageously inaccurate value judgments about Africa and Asia. Implicit in Engdhal’s pronouncement on large parts of Africa and Asia is his view on the literary integrity of those who have chosen to live there and the quality of their work. One wonders whether Engdhal realises how offensive such utterances are. Probably he does, and does not care. Perhaps other continents are not on Engdhal’s radar, cocooned as he is—like a crab under a rock, cheerfully contented in its limited universe, feeling no desire to explore the wide sea spread in front—in his belief that ‘Europe is still the centre of the literary world.’ The conceited, overweening Eurocentric swagger of Engdhal and his uppity trumpery reveal more about his profound anti-America bias, and ignorance (or disdain, or both) of non-European literature than the insularity of American literature. It is not the US, but Engdhal, who is insular, narrow minded, parochial, and ignorant.

Should it matter what Engdhal thinks of American literature? Not unless, perhaps, you are Philip Roth, and expecting the Nobel. Roth—you can bet your mortgage on it—is not going to win the award so long as the Swede has a say on the matter. But then, may be, Roth—who, together with Joyce Carol Oates, was said to be on this year’s secret five-person short-list for the Nobel—holds the same view about the Nobel as Saul Bellow, who, when he heard the news that he had been awarded the 1976 Nobel, is said to have remarked that while he was glad to have it, he could have lived without it. Roth is a great writer, an iconic figure in literature, like Conrad, Nabokov, and Scott Fitzgerald before him (to name just a few who wrote in English who are missing from the Nobel list), whose work will outlast that of many a Nobel Laureate.

Book of the Month: Pictures of Fidelman (Bernard Malmud)

Bernard Malmud was one of America’s most important novelists and short-story writers. His metier was depiction of Jewish lives, which he described poignantly and with grand lugubriousness in novels such as The Assistant and The Fixer, which won the 1966 Pulitzer award.

Pictures of Fidelman was the first book Malmud published after the Pulitzer-winning The Fixer. In it he ventures away from his usual, inner-city Jewish element, and tries a different canvas. It is a picaresque tale of sometimes-comic escapades of Arthur Fidelman, a self-confessed failure as a painter, who arrives in Italy to prepare a critical study of Giotto. In six chapters, which function entirely independently from each other, and which are only tenuously linked thematically, the reader learns what befalls the hapless and, at times, witless protagonist as he moves from Rome to Milan, and, following a brief hiatus in Naples, ends up in Venice: he is pursued on the streets of Rome by an exiled Israeli; he flagellantly falls in love with a woman who refuses to sleep with him, indeed humiliates him at every turn, until he paints her as Maddona; he gets blackmailed by a couple of brothel-owners into purloining Titian’s Venous of Urbino; he shacks up with a whore and even acts as her pimp while at the same time struggling to complete a long-cherished picture of himself and his mother; and finally, in Venice, he sleeps, first, with a woman he meets there, and then with her homosexual husband, while learning the art of glass-blowing—a peculiar pun on Malmud’s part, this—before returning to America, presumably a wiser—or is he, really?— man.

All but one of the six chapters, or stories, of Pictures of Fidelman were published separately over a period of ten years—Malmud felt obliged to explain why he had chosen these apparently disparate stories to publish as a single work—and perhaps because of this the novel has a somewhat contrived feel to it; the situations described in the chapters do not appear to arise naturally. However the Malmudian theme of acquiring self-knowledge and attaining, epiphanetically, a higher, noble plane through suffering is apparent here, too, albeit less convincingly and lacking the moral breadth of Malmud’s other, some might say weightier, works.

Pictures of Fidelman, in many ways, is vintage Malmud: punning and wise-cracking and soul uplifting. It is also somewhat different, not just in respect of its setting, but also in respect of Malmud’s almost mischievous bedimming—the chapter titled Pictures of the Artist, for example, is a peculiar assemblage of quotations and maunderings about art, truth, and devil among other things. The novel echoes themes of violence, confusion and, occasionally, breathtaking imagination. Malmud, like other great authors, had his special way with words, using them subversively so as to yield a unique flavour to the narrative.

Much of Malmud’s fiction, at some level, reflects his immigrant Jewish background and mingles history and fantasy, and comedy and tragedy. The juxtaposition of the grotesque and sublime gives Pictures of Fidelman, despite its flaws, a unique ambience.

Saul Bellow said of Malmud: ‘The accent of a hard-won and individual emotional truth is always heard in Malmud’s words. He is a rich original of first rank.’ How true.