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.

Adiga Wins the 2008 Man-Booker

Well, smack, as they say, my fanny, and call me Diana (or Charlie, if you prefer). A rank outsider has won the Booker; what a surprise! Arvind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, an acidic satire (is this a tautology?) on modern India, blew Michael Portillo’s socks off, and landed the glabrous Indian with the 2008 Man Booker prize. In recent years the Booker awarding committees seem to take special (and, you can’t help wondering, malicious) pleasure in proving the bookies wrong. They have done it for the fourth successive year, awarding the prize, as it happens, to two Irish and two Indian authors. Indeed, being tipped by the bookies as a favourite must, now, be counted as a certainty that the novel—it was Sebastian Barry’s misfortune to have been backed by the bookies to win the prize this year—will not make it.

For the record, Adiga is the fourth Indian born author after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai to have won the Booker. One can add to this list V.S. Naipaul, who, while he wasn’t born or lived in India, is of Indian ancestry. He (Adiga, not Naipaul), at 33, is the second youngest author to win the Booker, after Ben Okri (who won it when he was 32). He is the fourth author after Keri Hulme (1985), Arundhati Roy (1997) and DBC Pierre (2003) to win the award for his debut novel. In an interview to BBC Radio 4 Adiga laid to rest any fears that he might suffer the same fate as that of the two women, neither of whom has published another novel after their prize-winning efforts (although Roy, to be fair, has published a couple of works of non-fiction, and is rumoured to have been working, after a decade, on her second novel; Hulme, as the cliché goes, has disappeared without trace). When asked whether he was thinking about writing his next novel, Adiga replied that his next novel—he was rather coy about its subject matter, and mumbled some unconvincing clichés about writing being an intensely personal and private activity—was more or less complete. One imagines that after the Booker success he would not have much trouble in finding a publisher.

Adiga’s novel, which he has been at pains to clarify (a) is not so much angry as funny, and (b) was a ‘bestseller’ in his home-country, India, even before it was long-and-short-listed for the Booker (one hopes that the novel, which has so far sold a meagre 3000 copies in the West, will do better post-Booker), is about what he describes as the ‘other India’, comprising, he would have us believe, the majority of that country’s denizens, who have not reaped the rewards of the economic liberalization in the past decade or so. (Given the sobering statistics, announced by the World Health organization this month, outlining the extent of the problem of malnutrition facing modern India—40% of the world’s malnourished live in India, and some states in Northern and Central parts of India are apparently on par with some of the sub-Saharan African countries—there may be some truth in this claim.) This vast underclass, Adiga claims, is the real India, not the 5% of the affluent, educated, privileged class, to which, incidentally, he, a son of a doctor, belongs. Some have questioned Adiga’s credentials to write about underclass to which he does not belong, the implicit assumption being his view, therefore, is that of an outsider, not, somehow, quite echt. This is rather harsh. Orwell’s Down And Out in Paris and London is no less authentic because he belonged to the chattering classes. (It is not a very well known fact that in writing Down And Out in Paris and London Orwell was no more than a literary tourist. Orwell lived as a homeless and unemployed, all the time secure in the knowledge that he could return to the bosom of his wealthy family any time, which is what he did after a few weeks, having gathered, presumably, enough raw material to write a novel.) Adiga worked, for a few years, as a business journalist for the Time magazine, and, during his travels, had, allegedly, the opportunity to look at the downtrodden of India from close quarters. The White Tiger was the result of these travels, a novel, he has revealed, he wrote a few years ago, although it was published only recently. Adiga says he took upon himself to write about ‘the brutal injustice’ of the Indian society—‘India is a society of profound inequality and inequality is not just a moral vice, it also leads to instability’, he declares— since no one had done it, according to him, previously. By this, he probably means English language novels written by Indians. India is only a partial English speaking country, but it has a long literary tradition; there must be wealth of local literature waiting to be translated into English. One imagines literature was getting published in some or more of India’s several local languages—each state has its own language— for a while before some or more of the educated Indians cottoned on to the idea of writing in English, thereby attracting a wider audience, recognition (and possibly royalties) for their works; and it stretches the limits of credulity somewhat to assume that the disadvantaged and dispossessed went unrepresented in Indian literature before Adiga got his brainwave. In a recent interview Adiga drew comparisons with Flaubert, Balzac, and Dickens—nothing wrong in that; you might as well do it yourself if no one else seems to be in a rush to do it—claiming that his work, just like theirs, threw into sharp relief the injustice of the society; and he hoped that Indian society would be a better one as a result of his endeavours, just as French and British societies became better ones as a result of theirs. One has to admire the nobility of the young man’s ambition.

I have often wondered how a winner of such awards is chosen. There must have been books which were unanimous choices of all the judges. I should like to think that Schindler’s List and The Remains of the Day were two such winners. According to Paul Theroux, one of the judges on the 1979 panel, the winner that year, Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which holds the record of the shortest book to have won the Booker, was a ‘compromise winner’: the panel was apparently equally divided between those who felt V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River was a masterpiece and those who were determined (Theroux amongst them) to ensure that Naipaul, who, even then, had managed to antagonize many, did not win the Booker the second time. The White Tiger, by all accounts, was not a compromise winner. There was a fierce deadlock with Adiga edging out Barry, the Bookies’ favourite, 3:2. One judge was said to be in tears when she (or he) could not win over a third person to Barry.

Finally, what about Linda Grant, my choice for the Booker? Well, she might not have trousered the £ 50,000 award, but, according to her (appropriately named) blog, The Thoughtful Dresser, on which she was agitating for months about not having a suitable dress to wear for the ceremony, she was the only one of the short-listed author who ‘walked away with a free Oasis Clarke dress.’

Chronicles of A Dyspeptic Man: Workout

It is early in the morning and you are working out on a cross-trainer in the exercise room. The room unsuccessfully attempts to give an illusion of being twice its actual size by dint of a carpet-to-ceiling mirror attached to the wall directly in front of you. It also means that you can’t help looking at, from time to time, your own contorted face as you labour on the cross-trainer. On the sidewall is a plasma screen television showing news: a sultry brunette newsreader is discussing with a foxy blonde economic analyst the credit crunch and the crisis on the Wall Street. Both have an air of mild excitement about them as if they had, both, just then, received, or were waiting for, with eager anticipation, what they hoped to be a jolly good rogering.

The door of the exercise room opens and in walks a muscular man of above average height. He is not bad looking in a stolid, dull, vacant way. He seems overjoyed to see you and gives an ear-to-ear grin, revealing a full set of shiny white and rather larger teeth. You feel obliged to rearrange the muscles around your mouth, with an aim to position your lips in a way that could be construed as a hint of a smile.

This turns out to be a mistake. The man takes it as a cue to start conversation.

‘Are you having a good day, so far, sir?’ he asks.

It is a quarter to six in the morning. You had had a late and not very pleasant evening the previous day. You ate in a Chinese restaurant, the company not very sparkling, the waitress over-familiar, over-talkative, over-enthusiastic (and middle aged), feeling it was her duty to inform you how each and every dish you’d ordered was prepared—‘We marinate Mongolian Beef overnight’—till you’d wanted to slap her, and the adjoining table being occupied by a family with destructive toddlers who either wanted the same seat or the same apple juice or their mother’s attention at the same time. One of the toddlers was a girl who, having recently made the discovery that she could speak, was yakking non-stop (shamelessly abetted by her mother, who, instead of telling her to shut up so that others could eat in peace, was beaming at fellow diners with pride every time the girl made some inane comment, as if she had split atom), while the other toddler, a boy, not having attained, yet, the same level of linguistic competence, was throwing forks and knives in different directions with grim determination, much, you’d noticed, to the merriment of his father. One of the missiles had missed your nose by hair’s breadth and you’d felt obliged to tell the father that he ought to control the little brat more effectively, and he’d taken great pleasure in informing you that while he’d noted down your concern there was precious little he could do about it—‘Children will be children’. You had washed down the Mongolian Beef and Hakka Noodles with a bottle of Turner Road Merlot and had woken up at four thirty in the morning with a bursting bladder and your throat feeling as if someone had rubbed hot sand on it with a polish paper. Having considered your options, and voting in favour of exercising over a wank or watching porn, you’d come to the hotel’s gym, hoping that you’d not be disturbed. And then this saphead walks in.

Ignoring that you have ignored his greeting, the man walks towards the window of the third floor exercise room and, looking down at the car-park, declares, ‘Gorgeous day!’ He seems pleased with this discovery. You carry on peddling on the cross-trainer, hoping that he’d shut up or, preferably, go away.

‘You want a towel?’ You look over your shoulder and he is standing behind you, holding a small Turkish towel from the rack in the corner, provided by the management.

‘No, thanks.’

He makes his way towards the weights and looks down at them. You are looking at him in the mirror. He flexes his upper arm and gives an admiring glance to his bulging biceps. He then proceeds with the weights and is soon emitting sounds not unlike those one makes on the bog when constipated. As your ill luck would have it he pauses just when you pause to take a breather.

‘Where are you from, friend?’ he asks.

Not knowing, immediately, how to disabuse him of the misguided notion that you're his friend, you tell him.

‘Oh! My brother lives there,’ he exclaims. Every second fuckwit you meet these days seems to have a relative hiding in some hole in the city you live in. You know, with a sinking heart, what is going to follow.

‘He is in Computers,’ the man says.

‘Oh!’ you reply with tremendous incuriosity.

‘Yeh! Has been living there for almost ten years. Says he likes it there. I can’t see myself living there; I’d feel cramped.’

‘Have you been there any time?’

‘Nah! Jim—that’s my brother— invites me every time we speak, but it’s too long a distance to travel. I have never travelled to abroad. Never felt the need.’

‘There are aeroplanes, these days, you know. You can reach the other part of the globe in less than twenty four hours. Mind you, you’re not missing anything. It is an over-crowded, over-polluted, over-inflated, over-hyped place where there are only three seasons: miserable, more miserable and absolutely dreadful.’ You don’t know why you are saying this and prolonging your agony; you don’t really want to carry on with this conversation.

‘Ho! Ho! Ha! Ha! You’re a funny guy. I’d love to share a few jokes with you over cocktails.’

‘Unfortunately, my schedule is rather tight.’ While the chances of your meeting this man during the rest of your stay in the hotel (three days), outside of the exercise room, are very slim, you tell yourself you are wise to take precautionary measures.

‘This is a beautiful state,’ the man ventures more information.

‘Compared to what?’

‘Sorry?’

‘It was just that you said you’d never travelled out of the country. I was just curious to know what your reference point was.’

‘Yeh! Just that,’ the man replies. You suspect that the full range of human potentialities is rather limited in his case. Or, as Aldous Huxley would have put it, out of ten octaves that make up the human instrument, he can compass perhaps two.

The man walks to the water-fountain in the other corner of the room and starts drinking greedily, as if he has remembered, just then, how to do it. You return to your cross-trainer. He then walks back to the middle of the room and lies supine on the floor. He stretches his arms behind his head and lifts his hips in what you assume is some sort of stretching exercise. As his pelvis rises up, his loose black shorts fall back, partially revealing his balls and limp penis. He remains suspended in that position for a few seconds, then brings his pelvis down, his buttocks landing on the floor with a soft thud. You look the other way, quickly, before he attempts the manoeuvre again. A side-on view of the-word-you-think-is-Carajo-in Spanish is not something you wish to see first thing in the morning (or for that matter at any time of the day) on an empty stomach (or for that matter on a full stomach). The man gets up; in one quick motion readjusts the position of his penis (and scratches his balls); and returns to the weights. But not before making some more observations, this time on the national game.

‘Did you watch the World Series final last night? Cracking game.’

‘World Series final? Which game might you be talking about?’

It turns out he is talking about baseball.

‘I am afraid I don’t follow baseball. Is it possible to hold a world series for a game that is played in only one country?’

This query is met with the expected non sequitur. ‘We are crazy about baseball, here. You guys play a similar game, don’t you? Cricket? Very quaint.’

‘Yes. Very. It is played in a few countries.’

‘Do you follow it?’

‘Oh God! No! What’s the point in watching a game which goes on for days and ends without a result? And I can’t be bothered with all that jargon: you are in when you’re out, and out when you’re in’; rubbish like that.

‘Is it Football, then?’

‘Hate it. Entertainment for the lobotomised by the lobotomised.’

‘Which sport do you follow then?’

‘Let me think. Tennis. Women’s tennis to be precise. When Sharapova is playing, to be more precise. When she is bending down to receive a serve and the camera is focusing on her ass, to be even more precise.’

‘You are absolutely cracking me up.’

Well, as they say, de gustibus non est disputandum.

‘Wow! That’s, like, profound. What does it mean? Is it Latin?’

‘You are wrong there. It does sound like Latin, but it’s in fact Sanskrit.’

‘Are you sure?’ The man asks dubiously. Perhaps he is not as simple as that.

‘Absolutely. And it means: in matters of taste there is no argument. Anyway, it was nice talking to you; I have to get going, now.’

‘Well, it was great talking to you. Have a smashing day.’

You leave the exercise room thinking the rest of the day would indeed be smashing if you did have to listen to his vacuous drivel.

Later . . .

You walk into the breakfast room, which is half-empty, and, to your dismay, you see the man sitting on his own with a pile of rashers on his plate. He grins at you and you wince at the sight of those teeth; he indicates with a wave of his hand that he’d be delighted if you joined him. You really are left with no option. You go to the counter; add breakfast cereal to your bowl and pour (virtually fat free) milk on it. Then you walk slowly back to where the man is sitting, and sit on the next table. You turn to him and, in the immortal words of Sid James, say to him: ‘Do us a favour sunny Jim; go and fuck yourself.’

Book of the Month: Girl with Green Eyes (Edna Obrien)

Girl With Green Eyes is the second novel in Edna O’Brien’s celebrated Country Girls trilogy. The first, The Country Girls, appeared in 1960, and announced the arrival of a fresh, exciting voice on the British literary scene. Girl With Green Eyes, originally published as The Lonely Girl, appeared two years later, affirmed that O’Brien was a major talent.

The Girl With Green Eyes traces the lives of Cathleen (who prefers to be called Cait) and her childhood friend, Baba, both young women in their early twenties, who have moved to Dublin from the Irish countryside, and are, in their own ways, trying to get as much away as possible from their sheltered, puritanical Roman Catholic upbringing: they drink, dress up, spend evenings, whenever they can afford, in the dance halls; and, if they have not yet had had affairs in Dublin, it is not because of want of trying. The period is not clearly defined but is most probably the ‘50s. Baba, the daughter of a veterinarian, is the more adventurous of the two, and manages to cadge invitations to exhibitions and do’s. Tall, slim, and not exactly shy, Baba is not short of admirers. Cait, plump and ample-bosomed, is bashful and gauche, and follows Baba to the parties, loitering in the background, wanting to commingle with young men, but not quite having the courage to strike up conversations. However it is Cait who manages to becharm Eugene Gaillard, a filmmaker who is several years older than she, whom she meets at an exhibition. Eugene is non-Catholic and estranged from his American wife who has moved back to the States with their daughter. When an interfering busybody wises up Cait’s alcoholic father about what his daughter has been getting up to, via an anonymous poisonous letter, the father, accompanied by fellow drunkards from the village, arrives at Eugene’s house where Cait has taken to spending nights (although the relationship is not consummated). Bad girl Baba, in the meanwhile, manages to get a bun in the oven by sleeping with a married man. Cait sees Eugene as a great lover, while he sees her for what she is: an immature, insecure and confused girl-woman, who is rebelling against but is also a victim of her rigid upbringing. It is a fundamentally unbalanced romance, which is doomed to fail. When Cait leaves Eugene after one of their contretemps (which are becoming frequent), leaving behind a note that she is leaving for England together with Baba (who has—shock! horror!—had an abortion), inwardly hoping that he would come for her, she—and only she—is in for a surprise and heartache. The novel ends on an elegiac note for the lost love, but also with the hint that the young narrator has matured.

Given Edna Obrien’s rigid, Catholic upbringing—her family apparently was vehemently against anything to do with literature and O’Brien described her village community as ‘enclosed, fervid, and bigoted’—, the question has been posed repeatedly whether the trilogy is autobiographical. O’Brien has never answered this question directly. In an interview she replied, rather tartly, that the novels were autobiographical insofar she was born and bred in West Ireland, educated at a Convent, and was full of romantic yearnings, coupled with a sense of outrage.

Girl with Green Eyes, together with the other two novels in the trilogy, is rightly regarded as a work of high feminism. Its bold (for the times) themes—young women, raised conventionally, rebelling against their upbringing and exploring their sexuality—coupled with the irreverence displayed towards the traditionally strict, Irish religious customs meant this seminal work was banned in her native Ireland. In some ways, The Girl with green Eyes, indeed the trilogy, is a forerunner of the motif of O’Brien’s later works: women who are victims of harsh, almost cruel, upbringing, and who get entangled with men who let them down in a variety of ways. The difference here is that the young heroine of The Girl with Green Eyes is not resentful despite the rather callous and patronizing ways in which she is treated by her lover and family respectively, perhaps because she has the optimism of youth, or because the disappointments and reversals of life haven’t yet become wearisome and bred cynicism. This innocence and naivety is also conveyed very effectively by the unselfconscious, casual, almost bawdy tone of the narration. The ambiance of the novel is affectionate (without being affected) and effusive (without, at any time, being kitschy), in stark contrast to the rather isolated and dreary existence of Cait and Baba. It is impossible not to warm up to the two leprechauns. You may even shed a tear or two when young Cait suffers the inevitable heartache.

In Writers at Work Edna O’brien wrote: "They used to ban my books, but now when I go there, people are courteous to my face, though rather slanderous behind my back. Then again, Ireland has changed. There are a lot of young people who are irreligious, or less religious. Ironically, they wouldn't be interested in my early books - they would think them gauche." Nothing could be further from truth. The warm, affectionate glow of this delightful novel will continue to enchant readers for decades.