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

In the second section of his most recent, quite possibly his last, non-fiction book, Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, V.S. Naipaul recounts an incident. He is in Nigeria and, in the company of his local guide, a Muslim named 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 consultation is 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 to something 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 a grown-up daughter from her first marriage). The babalawo is thrown by this question. He says, ‘I thought only black people have such problems.’ The babalawo is nevertheless willing to give an opinion. He consults his exercise book, performs some rituals using cowry shells and two small gourds tied with a piece of string. Finally he is ready to tell Naipaul the future: ‘The girl,’ declares the babalawo portentously, ‘is not going to get married. You have many enemies. To break their spells we will have to 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 the traditional religion), Naipaul remarks, ‘the babalawo had them all in the palm of his hand.’ Then Naipaul says, ‘But what he [babalawo] has told me is good. I don’t want the girl to be married.’ Naipaul concludes the incident with the wry comment: ‘I believe only the reverence of Adesina and others saved the day.’

The above is 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 has reinvented himself in a literary career spanning more than five decades during which he has produced approximately thirty works of fiction and non-fiction.  He started off with novels. His early novels were brilliant works of satirical comedies with the Caribbean islands (where he was born and bred) as the backdrop. The two works from this period which stand out, for me, are Miguel Street and The House for Mister Biswas. Naipaul’s later fictional work became more sombre, assumed, for want of better phrase, more gravitas, and, as years went by, 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, in parts, still has comic moments. The grave, almost mythical, tone of his fiction is 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 (in chronological order): A Bend in the River, An Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. A Bend in the River is perhaps my most favourite Naipaul novel, but A Way in the World is extraordinary, too. It is not a conventional novel at all; rather it is a complex interweaving of personal memories, stories of possibly real life characters, and historical metafiction: it is, quite simply, awesome.

Naipaul did not build his reputation solely on fiction, though. Had Naipaul restricted himself only to writing fiction, he would still have earned his place in the annals of world literature. I do not know what the critics would have made of his later fiction, but certainly his early fiction would have been acknowledged—perhaps still is—as fiction which opened gates for talented Commonwealth Writers (Salman Russhdie, Rohinton Mistry, Caryl Philips etcetera).

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

The Masque of Africa with its somewhat imprecise subtitle—the Glimpses of African Beliefs—is Naipaul’s first work of non-fiction in over a decade. In it he returns to the continent he first visited 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 at the Makerere University in Kampala (a version of which he used some years later in A Bend in the River—the country, not the university)—Naipaul visits five more African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gabon and South Africa.

Naipaul is mainly interested in finding out about the traditional religions of Africa, the older, animistic beliefs and practices that were prevalent in the continent before the two great religions of the world—Christianity and Islam—arrived and  asserted themselves—imposed, even,—on the population. Naipaul wants to know, bearing in mind the theme of his travel, what has happened to the traditional religions of Africa.

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

Naipaul famously said once, ‘An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.’ By his own yardstick, The Masque of Africa lends itself vulnerable to the charge of Naipaul distorting or not reporting faithfully— either because his memory has played tricks with him or because what he has heard does not fit into his pre-conceived notion about Africa—what he hears in his meetings with the Africans. 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 write anything that would make you pause and think and examine your conceptions) brazenly says that the ‘transcribed monologues’ seemed ‘bogus’ to him. That is an 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 of Naipaul’s conversations with the Africans:  it would appear that Boyd’s view of Naipaul’s travel writing is changed forever by what he calls the French Effect (referring to warts and all ‘authorized’ biography of Naipaul by Patrick French, never mind that both Naipaul and his second wife have since expressed bitterness and reservations about the biography). At the end of the day these are subjective impressions which cannot be explained away rationally. For what it is worth none of the conversations with the various people Naipaul meets in the course of his travels seemed inauthentic to me. However, it would be fair to say that some of the conversations make uncomfortable reading. Here is an extract of the conversation between Naipaul and a distinguished academic, a former dean of the University of Gabon, a man of mixed ancestry (French father and African mother) but, who, Naipaul comments, ‘like many people of mixed ancestry, appeared to be embracing the African side of his inheritance.’ This man, a lawyer by profession, who thinks of himself as a political scientist and teaches political anthropology at the University of Gabon, is also a passionate believer 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. When Naipaul asks him whether he can define the religion of forest more closely, he replies, ‘in a precise, academic way’:

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

Does this sound ‘bogus’? How about the following? After describing to Naipaul the levels of ‘organic world’, the lawyer explains the ‘initiation ceremony’:

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

Naipaul then 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 thinks about it, the lawyer replies, ‘There is no name. It is too shocking.’ Then, for the first time in this entire piece, Naipaul gives the reader a glimpse of what he thinks, his judgment as it were: ‘It was a relief to hear him say that. He had spoken of ‘energy’ in such a positive way I thought he might have been more accepting.’

The format of The Masque of Africa is similar to Naipaul’s earlier travel writings, a genre that he created. He travels to countries; he visits places in these countries and observes; and he talks and listens. He meets people and asks them questions. You get the impression by the very nature of these encounters that they are not random; that the people Naipaul meets are ‘recruited’ by his contacts in the country he is visiting because they are ‘interesting’. Almost everyone Naipaul meets during his African travels and whose conversations he records for the reader is a well educated African occupying a high position or holding down a white collar job, who has interesting things to say about Africa and its old religion.

And what does Naipaul find when he speaks to these selected individuals? He discovers that underneath the patina of Christianity and Islam, the old, traditional religion lives on. Some of these individuals are comfortable with it and in their minds have dual identities without any cognitive dissonance, such as some of the Nigerians Naipaul meets, who consider themselves Catholic Christians belonging to the Yoruba tribe and have no hesitation in performing traditional rites not approved by ‘modern’ religions. Some others, like Nicole, the lady police body-guard Naipaul is provided with in Gabon, have rejected the old religion totally and become staunch Christians. In Gabon Naipaul, with Nicole, visits an isolated establishment in the village of Lope, deep in the forest, where the tribal chief has promised to show him the siren of the river—a white woman. As it 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 Gabonese anxiety about water, an inauspicious element. The talk about the white sirens at the bottom of the river wouldn’t have pleased her at all; and she had been praying and praying, against hope for much of the time, that the river trip wouldn’t take place. Now, miraculously, her prayers have been answered, giving her, I suppose, yet another proof of the power of the prayer.’

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

‘She was a Christian and wanted no part of this spirit talk. The drumming and chanting might have been done only for tourists, but it agitated her. Working her lips but not speaking loudly, she was saying ‘Hail Mary’ again and again, speaking her Christian charm against whatever charms were in play here, and unwittingly paying tribute to the power of African spirits.’

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

‘Modernity wants us to sweep our culture away, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict between Christianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there was a drought, 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 the missionaries called it devil worship. Culture does not die—today it is called witchcraft. My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in a special way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over their grave, to protect 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 had to stop that, as it was not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was so afraid that the twins would come and kill her living children. I talk to myself so as not to get confused. To me it is all about belief and what treats you well. In traditional religion it was not about money. It was a communal spirit and people come together for common cause like the drought.’

And, Naipaul concludes:

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

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

Although Naipaul does not directly say this, the impression you are left with—the impression Naipaul wants you to be left with—is that on the whole ‘outside’ religions such as Christianity, foisted upon the Africans by a bunch of fanatical missionaries—exemplified by ‘Doctor’ Schweitzer (who is briefly mentioned)—, who had no love or respect for the old African beliefs, were inimical to the African culture. The Africans were told, as the Christianity sought to impose its intellectual superiority, that their traditional beliefs and ideas about nature and divinity were mere superstitions, of low value. The Africans were compelled, almost, to feel ashamed of their heritage which was dismissed as mere mumbo-jumbo (the book traces the origin of this word and links it to an ancient African (Nigerian) custom). It was cultural imperialism of the worst kind, and its effect was calamitous. The closest Naipaul comes to voicing this is to imply that if left to its own traditional beliefs Africa ‘might have arrived at its own more valuable synthesis of old and new’. It is a compelling argument, all the more so because Naipaul does not actually make it; he leaves it to the reader to figure it out.

For the best part Naipaul refrains scrupulously from making any value judgments. Occasionally, though, the mask slips; and what is revealed is weary exasperation. For example, in Ivory Coast, the land of ivory, but ‘now without the elephants that by their death provided the ivory of their tusks’, he describes two ‘cruel’ elephant monuments: one of a female elephants with her calf (elephants, Naipaul informs, 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, there is a detailed description of how bats are caught and boiled before they are eaten in the Ivory Coast. These fruit bats or their fleas, the reader is informed, are carriers of the deadly Ebola virus. ‘The victims bleed helplessly till they die. No one knows for sure how the virus jumps from bat to man; but a good guess is that the virus is transmitted by the eating of the bat.’ Naipaul ends 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 visual drama of West Africa: it was like a plague waiting to fall on the men below.’

In the first country he visits, Uganda, Naipaul talks about a chimpanzee sanctuary set on one of the islands of Lake Victoria: forty two animals, he informs, whose parents and animals had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are ‘great relishers of what they call as bush meat’ and—Naipaulian acerbity, this—‘given guns and left to themselves would easily eat their way through the continent’s wildlife.’

Naipaul is similarly unsparing when it comes to looking at (and presenting to the reader) his own instincts and impulses; and they, too, at times, make uncomfortable reading. In Gabon, Naipaul comes to know about the Pigmies, ‘the small people’—‘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, this is how Naipaul records his feelings:

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

This need not appear as chilling (or racist) as it did to some reviewers. What Naipaul seems to be saying here is that he found it very difficult to understand how it might 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 Africans seem to have the love for the ‘first inhabitants of the forest’. Naipaul meets a Gabonese tribal chief and traditional healer of the Fang tribe (appointed by the Gabonese government). This man, who was baptized and confirmed, but decided that ‘the traditional religion was strong in him’, tells Naipaul how he was trained in the religious rituals of the tribe. This is what he says:

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

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

The first is Naipaul’s affection towards animals, in particular domestic pets such as cats and dogs. This is the only time the otherwise detached, at times almost haughty, Naipaul comes closest to betraying his emotions. And Africa provides him 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 plight of these animals that Naipaul’s prose appears to lose its cool, as in the following paragraph:

‘The land is full of cruelty which is hard for the visitor to bear. From the desert countries to the north long-horned cattle are sent for slaughter here in big, ramshackle trucks, cargoes of misery that bump along the patched and at times defective autoroutes to Abidjan, to the extensive abattoir area near the docks. And there in trampled and vile black earth these noble creatures, still with dignity, await their destiny in the smell of death, with sometimes a calf, all alone, without a mother, finding comfort of sort in sleep, a little brown circle on the dirty ground, together with the beautiful goats and sheep assembled for killing. The ground around d the abattoir goes on and on. When sights like these meet the eyes of the simple people every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.’

A tad over the top, perhaps, towards the end, but heartfelt; it seems almost as if that Naipaul reserves such empathy as he has for the animals and has nothing left for the humans.

The second stream is Naipaul’s anxieties about money. He comes across as a miser. In his travels he visits a number of shrines, tombs, witchdoctors, and soothsayers in different countries. And they all want money or gifts, which Naipaul is most reluctant to give them. In almost every meeting with the medicine-men and tribal chiefs he is inwardly calculating and agitating about how much it is going to cost him, worried that he might be ripped off. And the funny thing is he does not pay for anything on even a single occasion; he makes his African guides 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 only alcoholic drink the chief is allowed to accept) which would then be offered as libation to the ancestors. Naipaul does not take with him schnapps—which, you think, wouldn’t have emptied his bank account—, and notes nonchalantly that it was 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 the description of Naipaul as skinflint in Paul Theroux’s memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow). It is quite funny, though I am not sure that it is intentional.

With a few exceptions—Ghana and South Africa—Naipaul generally steers clear of the political contexts of the countries he visits. I do not think it is an oversight on part of the great man, and absence of political context does not detract a jot from the enjoyment the reader derives from the book. The Masque of Africa is an attempt to examine the cultural, traditional beliefs of the African countries Naipaul visited and the extent to which these beliefs, subterranean under the Christian and Muslim dogmas, guide the daily lives of inhabitants; it is not a chronicle of the political upheavals in these countries, which, in any case, are too many (and too frequent, in some cases) to have been done justice to in this book.

Naipaul is a keen and acute observer. Nothing escapes him. This is his strength, as in his meetings with the former military leader of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, and the former wife of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela. Naipaul is in his elements when he describes these meetings. At other times, though, he strikes a slightly shrill note in his descriptions of poverty and dirt (which seem to be everywhere he goes); it tends to get a tad wearisome after a while. That is not to say however that what he has written is untrue. In one of the countries he visits Naipaul is appalled by what he sees: the roads are in disrepair; garbage litters the sides of the road, uncollected; trim bungalows are replaced by ugly, corrugated shacks— themselves in dilapidated states; and the green hills he remembered so well have all but disappeared. He writes simply:

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

The country is Uganda which saw its population, in the forty years since Naipaul first visited it, explode from 5 million in the 1960s to 30 million in the first decade of 21^st century, despite decades of civil war and AIDS epidemic, and which, lest we forget, was not without its own brand of racism when, during the tyrannical reign of Idi Amin, it persecuted and ultimately drove away tens of thousands of Asians who had lived peacefully in that country for generations, for no other reason than they were of a different race.

Over the years Naipaul has been accused of many things by his detractors: misanthropy, misogyny, cruelty, racism and, following the publication of The Masque of Africa, of Fascism (by Robert Harris who earns his living by writing racy thrillers which, while they might be made into F grade Hollywood films and fetch him a packet, would not require, it would be safe to assume, to exercise more than 10% of the neurones of an averagely intelligent person). The viciousness of the attacks on Naipaul has reached a higher decibel since he was awarded the Nobel. I have to say that none from the usual list of accusations thrown at Naipaul was evident to me in Masque of Africa, which—give or take an odd loose sentence—is an honest attempt by a non-believer (ancient or modern religions) to arrive at a humane understanding of the centuries-old African beliefs.

The Masque of Africa is an outsider’s view of the African countries he visits. The outsider does not claim to have special knowledge of the African countries; he does not even claim to have special affection for these countries; neither does he have any pre-conceptions; he is a visitor 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 us uncomfortable, that is of no concern to him.

And when the observer is the greatest living prose writer of our times the result is a dazzling spectacle of melancholic beauty. 

Books Read in 2011

Below is the list of books I read in 2011.

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

Nonfiction

1. Nine Lives (William Dalrymple)
2. Elephant in the Room (Graham Swift)
3. A Feast of Freud (Clement Freud)
4. Small Memories (Jose Saramago)
5. One Morning in Sarajevo (David James Smith)
6. Indian Takeaway (hardeep Singh Kohali)
7. Swimming in a Sea of Death (David Rieff)
8. The Masque of Africa (V.S. Naipaul)
9. Mango Orchard (Robin Bayley)
10. Four Girls from Berlin (Marianne Mayerhoff)
11. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)
12. Uncle Tungsten (Oliver Sacks)
13. Stalin Ate My Homework (Alexi Sayle)
14. The Mango Orchard (Robyn Bailey)
15. 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 of sixty nine.

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

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

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


Beer in the Snooker Club is the only novel written by the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali (written in English). I first became aware that there was a writer called Ghali when, in 2009, I read Diana Athill’s memoir, After A Funeral. The memoir lays bare, in painful details (Athill has made a habit of publishing memoirs which are searingly painful, honest etcetera, in which she talks freely about her own foibles and somehow manages to emerge shining; it is not an easy trick to master), her relationship with an Egyptian writer who is referred to throughout as ‘Didi’. The memoir mentions that ‘Didi’ had written a novel by the publishing company for which Athill worked as an editor, and that Athill had greatly liked the novel. A little bit of Internet search revealed that ‘Didi’ was an Egyptian writer named Waguih Ghali and he had indeed written a novel entitled Beer in the Snooker Club. I ordered the book from Amazon and I am glad I read it. Beer in the Snooker Club tells the story of an Egyptian Coptic Christian, Ramos, who is a poor member of an affluent and well connected joint family. The novel is set in the 1950s; the British have left the region, officially, but their presence is very much there; the Suez crisis is still a few years away, but there is a growing sense of nationalism amongst the Egyptians. The action, such as it is, takes place in Egypt and England. Novel, via various misadventures of its protagonist, gives a snapshot of the Egyptian upper classes during a period of socio-political upheaval in that country. Acutely observed—Ghali is at his caustic best while describing the pretensions of the Egyptian rich, or the British 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 my view, when a novel lives up to all the pre-publication hype. This is a novel which is as good as they said it was, a first class read. I have reviewed Freedom on the blog.

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

The Jewish-American writer Henry 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 Roth disappeared from the literary world and did not publish another novel for sixty years (surely, the longest ever writer’s block in the history). Indeed when Call It Sleep enjoyed a revival in the 1960s, many did not even known whether Roth was even alive.  Roth made a triumphant return to fiction writing in the 1990s (by that time he was well into his eighties) with an epic four-volume novel-sequence, two of which were published after his death (in 1995). In 2010 was published another, probably Roth’s last novel, An American Type, edited from the extensive notes Roth had left behind. Like all of Roth’s previously published novels, 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 attracted lukewarm praise from the critics, and is struggling with writer’s block. Roth's writing style is very lyrical,. There are some memorable characters in An American Type, in particular M (Roth’s wife in real life who, he said in an interview, saved him), whom the protagonist marries towards the end of the novel. An American Type is not a novel to cheer you on a gloomy day, but a very worthwhile read.

Slaughterhouse 5 was the novel that made Kurt Vonnegut’s reputation. 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 friend disabused me of the notion, and I read the novel in 2011. Vonnegut’s post-modern take on the Allied bombing of Dresden (that killed thousands in a single day) towards the end of the Second World War may not be to everyone’s taste, nor his minimalist style, heavy in irony. But I like it. I  knew (even without reading it) that Slaugterhouse 5 was a great novel and reading it confirmed what I had always known.

The British writer Patrick Hamilton is a largely forgotten name these days. If he is remembered at all, it is for the two plays he wrote—Rope and Gaslight—which were made into very successful Hollywood films in the 1940s. (Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for her role in Gaslight). In the 1930s (when he was only in his twenties), Hamilton wrote three novels based around a fictional London pub named Midnight Bell. Originally published separately, these three novels: Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure and Plains of 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 I haven’t seen).  The three novels—each one is a compact little novel that can be enjoyed on its own—are interlinked and tell the stories of the lives of three protagonists which overlap. At times Hamilton’s prose is a bit mannered, but these chronicles—suffused with dark humour— of the urban obsessions, frustrations, but also hope, are great reads.

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

I do not much read historical fiction, in particular fiction that deals with remote historical events of extraordinary significance, pullulating with real life characters. I am therefore amazed that I took to reading A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s behemoth of a novel (more than 800 pages) covering the first four years of the French revolution, and absolutely loved it. A Place of Greater Safety is a mix of thriller, tragedy, intrigue and romance, told in a bravura style—a compelling portrait of a society on the cusp of cataclysmic changes.

Penelope Lively, the winner of the 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’s novels, depending on your view, is either well circumscribed or narrow. A lot of her novels are about the trials and tribulations of middle class families. I don’t have any problem with that—better stick to what you know best. Family Album, Lively’s sixteenth novel, is like a series of snapshots—it does not have a linear narrative—of a middle class family between the 1970s and 1980s. The narrative is slightly distracting because Lively changes from first to third person frequently. I could cope with that; what I could not understand was why Lively felt the need to shift from past to present tense and vice versa in the middle of a paragraph.  On the whole, though, Family Album is an intelligent and moderately absorbing tale.

Another ‘intelligent’, 'middle class' novel, of women plagued with the suspicion that their lives are unfulfilled, 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 whom and how, and desperately want to have affairs (I do; that is I like to read such novels), you will like Natural Curiosity.

Girls in their Married Bliss is the third novel of Edna O'Brien’s celebrated Country Girls trilogy. I have reviewed the second novel of thetrilogy (Girl with Green Eyes), which I loved, on this blog. Girls in their Marrried Bliss follows the lives of the guileless and lovable protagonists 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, the hallmark of a classic. It is difficult to believe that copies of O'Brien’s Country Girl novels were burnt in Ireland because of the frank portrayal of the sexual lives of the protagonists.

I read two novels of the British comic writer Howard Jacobson in 2011: The Finkler Question, which won the 2010 Booker Prize and an earlier 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 slightly different in that the protagonist, thus tortured, is not Jewish but suspects that he might be, or thinks he ought to be; I don’t exactly remember. But it does 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. It is a rare gift, and Jacobson is a seriously comic writer. He is a treasure.

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

David Mitchell is one of the most exciting and talented writers writing in English today. I have read two of his previous novels: Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. Both were brilliant reads. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, has, in contrast to these two novels, 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 an ambitious novel (another historical novel I read this year; but very different from A Place of Greater Safety) of intrigue and drama, and Mitchell almost pulls it off. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet may not be a masterpiece, but it is still is gripping yarn.

Another Part of the Wood is one of the early novels of the great Beryl Bainbridge. The novel is like a set-piece in a movie with a twist at the end. Written in Bainbridge’s trademark sparse style, Another Part of the Wood gives 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 a writer, and David Golder was one of her successful, if controversial novel. When the Nazis controlled France Nemirovsky went into hiding where she started writing another novel. She had not completed the novel when she was arrested, transported to Auschwitz and gassed immediately upon arrival. She was 39. The incomplete manuscript was with Nemirovsky’s daughter, who could not bring herself to look at it for almost five decades. The incomplete novel, entitled Suit Francaise, was published to great acclaim a few years ago. The success of the novel created an interest in this until-then forgotten author and many of her earlier novels are now available in English translation. David Golder is a character study of a self-made man who, now that he is dying at 68, has realized that wealth has not 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 Jewish man by a Jewish writer, which was considered to be unsympathetic. Nemirovasky was regarded by some as a ‘self-hating Jew’. May be I am missing something, but I did not find the portrayal of the novel’s eponymous hero unsympathetic. Golder may be cold and ruthless and calculating, but he has a human side to him; the portrayal is not stereotypical or caricaturesque. A good read.

Matt Beaumont is not a name (I think) that is widely known outside of the UK. Which is a shame, as he is one of the funniest writers I have read. I have read five novels of Beaumont, four of which were comic novels and had me in splits. The novel I read in 2011 was E2. It is a novel, like its predecessor (Beaumont’s debut novel), written entirely 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 American novelist David Leavitt. It traces the last five years of the life of the celebrated Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, during which Ramanujan collaborated with the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and left behind a body of work that ensured that his name would be remembered by posterity. The Indian Clerk is a very well written ambitious, dense and expansive novel of great depth. A very satisfying read.

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 in 1988), which I read in 2011. The New Confession is a memoir of a Scotsman born at the turn of the twentieth century. The story of the ultimately inconclusive life of the enthusiastic, vain and (in some respect myopic) John James Todd is an 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 novel after many years, in 2011. Dunmore was the recipient of the inaugural Orange Prize for fiction for her novel, A Spell of Winter. I had read it at the time and it had not worked for me. I had therefore given a wide birth to Dunmore’s subsequent novels. 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 educated classes, before his death in 1953. That interested me. The Betrayal is a novel—to borrow a football cliché—of two halves. The first half is brilliantly paced and Dunmore builds up an atmosphere of unease. By comparison the second half is slow, laborious and the ending is a tad anti-climactic (though historically accurate).

I have read a few novels of the South African novelist Barbara Trapido. I thought that the semi-autobiographical Frankie and Stankie was brilliant. The rest (that I have read) were tolerable. Sex and Stravinsky, Trapido's most recent novel, is tolerably tolerable 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 even though 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 has the most unreliable narrator in the history of world literature. The guy is either a fantastist or an extremely cunning killer, you are not sure which; but by the time you come to the end of the novel which has more twists than a circus contortionist’s performance, you don’t really care; you simply can’t take it all in; it is ridiculous. An easy read, though, perfect to take on holidays.

Nicholas Shakespeare is a British writer whose one previous novel I have read. It was called High Flyer and was a comedy of manners. Reading it had not convinced me that I should read more novels of Shakespeare, and for the past several years I had not read his novels, one of which (Dancer Upstairs) was made into a film directed by John Malkovich. Inheritance, Shakespeare’s most recent novel, which I read in 2011, is like two novels in one. The first one is a modern comedy of manners, which worked for me. The second, a historical tale with the Armenian massacre as its backdrop didn’t.

Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle was short-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize in fiction. It has an interesting theme—post-colonial Trinidad. In the novel Roffee tries to tackle big political themes, but the novel essentially is of unserious nature; it merely scratches at the surface. There are plenty of dramatic moments in the novel, but no real drama. 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 his sell by date. I disagree. However, Pregnant Widow, Amis’s most recent tale of a bunch of teenagers (with enough hormones flowing to keep a Soho whorehouse in business for years) in the flower-power era, who spend a holiday in an Italian castle, does not find him in a sparkling form. That said, Martin Amis never lets me down totally. There are passages of great wit and humour in the novel, which is a descent read.

Now to the disappointments.

Cormac McCarthy is considered a great American novelist. His The Road won the Pulitzer Award for Fiction in 2007, and was also made into a film. Set in a post-apocalyptic world in an unnamed country (presumably America) without any reference to past and future, The Road is a story of a father and son travelling from one desolate scene to another. Sometimes they come across empty houses. The son is wary and tells his father to be careful. The father tells him he will be careful. The son, frequently, is not convinced, but the father tells him that they do not have a choice, and if they are at all to survive and not 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—sometimes it is a house, at other times it is a gas station, some other times it is an abandoned ship. As for what they find in these places, sometimes they find food, sometimes they don’t. And . . . well, that’s about it. They stomp through ash; they sleep in ditches; they stomp through more ash; then they find another ditch to sleep in. The novel is about as engaging as watching paint dry.

Another award winning fiction that failed to enthrall was Paul Harding’s Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Award for fiction. At just under 200 pages Tinkers is not a big novel, but it is a slog. It is a slog for a 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 impressionistic descriptions of nature. The prose is belaboured and not particularly alluring. The novel, really, had no redeeming features for me. The only thing I learned after reading Tinkers was that it is not possible to die of boredom.

Continuing with the theme of award-winning novels which are tedious beyond 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 the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. Set in an unnamed country in an unnamed region (although less than subtle hints are dropped that the country is former Yugoslavia) Tiger’s Wife attempts to be an allegory and fable at the same time, and manages to be neither.  Like Tinkers, Tiger’s Wife, too, is full of descriptions of nature, which serve no other purpose than emphasizing that the author has nothing interesting to say.

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

I do not find William Golding, the 1981 Nobel Laureate, an easy read. Apart from The Lord 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 look good). I read The Pyramid, which was described as Golding’s most accessible novel. The Pyramid depicts three episodes in the life of a young man, named Oliver. These episodes have little in common except that they take place in the same obscure English village. The premise of The Pyramid is rather slender. Golding touches upon some universal themes and there are a few funny scenes in the novel, especially the second section; but the novel, overall, has a bumpy, uneven feel to it. The Pyramid might be Golding’s most accessible novel, but it is not the more absorbing for it. 

Ian McEwan is one of the leading British novelists of our times. He is a novelist who has managed to be commercially successful and be a hit with the critics. I have read quite a few of McEwan’s novels and with the exception of an early novel, have not liked any of them. Solar, McEwan’s latest offering, has all the elements that I associate with his novels: it is over-long, verbose, and full of redundant information, with the usual splattering 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 and the 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 a disaster. Words fail me to describe how awful the novel is. Theroux used to be a very good writer; there are many novels of his which I have thoroughly enjoyed. I am not even going to bother describing the plot of A Dead 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 of non-fiction in 2011. Of the 15 non-fiction books there were a few memoirs, the best and one I enjoyed the most was The Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara. The memoir was originally published in Spanish in the 1980s as two volumes. The English translation which came out in 2007 combines the two volumes in one. Written by Che Guevara’s father (also, somewhat confusingly, called Ernesto Guevara), the memoir focuses on Che Guvera’s early life as a child growing up in Argentina and his training as a doctor. Based extensively on the copious letters Che Guevara wrote to his family, the memoir is a moving and absorbing read that gives an insight into the mind of the man who smilingly went to his death in a remote corner of the world (at the hands of CIA agents) and who, more than forty years after his death remains an iconic figure. Five stars.

Alexi Sayles used to be a slightly unhinged (and popular) left-wing stand-up comedian in the 1980s and 1990s, before he gave that up and made an apparently successful transition to fiction writing. I have read one of his novels; I think it was called Overrun. I remember much of this novel except that it was funny in parts and not very impressive. Stalin Ate My Homework is Sayles’s memoir of growing up as the only child of left-wing parents in the 1960s Liverpool, UK. The memoir is engaging in parts and Sayles has drawn memorable portraits of both his parents, especially his Jewish mother, Molly. In 2010 I read a delightful memoir, entitled When Skateboards will be Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh, of being brought up by a single mother who was convinced that there would be a Communist revolution in America. Sayles comes from a less dysfunctional family than Sayrafiezadeh's, but his parents were not any less eccentric in their political views than Sayrafiezadeh’s.

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

Four Girls from Berlin is a memoir by Marianne Meyerhoff which tells the story of her Jewish mother who escaped from the clutches of the Nazis just in time (her parents and brother were not so lucky) to arrive in America. It is a 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 few years ago, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. In Small Memories we find the great Portuguese 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 delight to read. What strikes you the most when you finish reading Small Memories is that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in Saramago’s background and childhood that suggests that he was going to be, in fullness of time, the recepint of a prestigious literary award, a proof, if proof be needed, that great 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 son mentions 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 this time 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 treatments including the bone marrow transplant which, according to doctors was going to be tricky given Sontag’s age (they were right). Sontag, depending on your view, either went down fighting all the way, or subjected herself to avoidable pain 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 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1914, an event that propelled Europe towards the First World War that killed millions. The book also throws light on the lives of the young men 9About whom not a lot is known) who plotted to kill the heir apparent. It is not an easy book to read, 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 remarkable individuals he meets during his travels in India.  Some of the stories (I presume they are true stories) are so unusual that they stretch the limits of your credulity. India is a strange land.

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

My top ten novels of 2011

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

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

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

Remembering W.G. Sebald

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

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

Sebald also wrote novels. At the time of his untimely death in 2001, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Sebald’s reputation in the UK as a writer of great merit was on an upward swing. Indeed there were some who felt he would win the Nobel Prize 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 the recently diseased writers who would have been a worthy laureate.) Sebald had, by that time, published four novels, all written in German, originally, and published in his native Germany earlier than their English translations. His first 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 came out in 1996. In 1998 was published The Rings of Saturn. The last novel to come out was Austerlitz, published in 2001.

Austerlitz is one of the most moving novels I have read. It tells the story of a lonely, melancholy man, brought up as an only 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 novel progresses, we learn that Fred Astaire was born Jacques Austerlitz. Austerlitz is a man, like the protagonists of Sebald’s other novels, burdened with memories. The burden, in this case, is puzzling, even to the man carrying the burden, because he is not actually consciously aware that he is carrying the burden. Gradually, as years go by, via chance encounters and apparently unrelated events, the memories, suppressed since childhood, break through, and slowly Austerlitz becomes painfully aware of his identity. The novel is a brilliant 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 the horror 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 the more 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 me with 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 a translated work of fiction. I wonder what effect it would have had on me, had I been able to read German, the language in which the novel was originally published. (In an interview Sebald said that there were three and a half real persons behind Austerlitz. One of them was a person about whom he watched a documentary by ‘sheer chance’. This person was an ‘apparently English’ woman who was brought up in Wales in a Calvinist household. She had been brought to England with her twin. The twin had died and the woman grown up without knowing that she had a twin or her origins were in a Munich orphanage.)

To write a novel on the theme of the Holocaust is a formidable challenge. What Sebald has achieved in Austerlitz is astounding. It is a superb novel; a towering achievement.

The Emigrants is another novel of Sebald I have read and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Like Austerlitz, the novel is a potent and powerful mixture of history, autobiography and meditative discursions. In The Emigrants, Sebald tells apparently factual stories of four men and the devastation that the Second World War brought to their lives. The Emigrants is a work of fiction, though it is presented as factual accounts (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 waning years of the Third Reich, and who (again, like his creator) lives elsewhere but returns time and again, almost against his wishes, to the country of his birth.

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

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

I have also read the only work of non-fiction of Sebald that has (so far) appeared in English: On the Natural History of Destruction. Like all of Sebald’s work there was a  gap of several years between 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 On the Natural History of Destruction Sebald describes and discusses the allied campaign towards the end of the Second World War. It is a powerful and striking book. Sebald does not beat around the bush in pointless euphemisms. He comes straight to the point. The Book starts with the sentence:

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

Then comes the statistics: 1 million tons of bombs were dropped on 131 German cities—repeatedly on some of them—most of which were flattened. More than half a million German civilians were killed in these raids; 3.5 million homes were destroyed; and, as the war finally came to its bloody end, 7.5 million were left homeless. More mind-numbing statistics follow: in Dresden, in February 1945 (when the Third Reich was in its last throes), the SS burned 7000 corpses in 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 city leapt up 2000 meters towards the sky. Sebald tells about a writer named Victor Golllancz who spent a month in the British occupied zone of Hamburg, Dusseldorf and the Ruhr. Gollancz particularly noted the profound lethargy of the Germans, which, he remarked, was the most striking feature of the contemporary German urban population. ‘People drift about in such lassitude,’ he wrote, ‘that you are always in danger of running them down when you happen to be in the car.’

What intrigued and shocked Sebald, in equal measures, was the collective silence of the German people about this unprecedented and unparalleled and wanton (and, it might be argued, with some justification, unnecessary) destruction of their land by the enemy. He writes at one point in the book:

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

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

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

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

On the Natural History of Destruction is an essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the madness of the Second 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 his medium was ‘prose, not novel’. That is apparent in all his books I have read. There is a kind of ‘stream of consciousness’ quality to his writing. His writing is not dramatic;if anything it is anti-dramatic. It is discursive and meandering at times, yet it touches your heart.  The novels that I have read were, so I felt, meditations on memory and past which come to have a profound effect on our present in ways we don’t always 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 in Norwich. Sebald was at the peak of his powers when he died, and one wonders what he would have achieved had he lived. His untimely death was a great loss to literature.