Bruges

You are sitting in a café in the Markt, or the Market Square. You had to rush into it as it had started pouring, and now, ten minutes later, there is bright sunshine. There is a word for this, a well-fed Belgian with luxurious growth of facial hair (technically it was a moustache, but it covered three fourth of the surface area of his face) had told you earlier, in the local, Flemish, language. The Belgian was very friendly and made heroic efforts to speak English. You had nodded from time to time trying to convey the impression that you were appreciative as well as grateful for his troubles, jumping on occasions out of the reach of his flailing arm to avoid your eyes getting poked. You think he was giving you general directions of the interesting places you could visit, but he could well have been telling you the recipe of Waterzoostje and the relative merits of adding to it Belgian beer instead of wine; you did not actually understand much of what he was saying. Anyway, the Flemish word for the weather where rain and sunshine play hide and seek sounded like Jebure. You like the sound of the word; you don’t think there is an equivalent word for it in English.

You have travelled to Bruges in the morning from Brussels, and it took just under an hour. On your way you had browsed through the tourist guide. It had compared Bruges to Cinderella—the city was left behind in its “medieval rags” while the other Flemish cities “joined the ball of industrialization in the nineteenth century”. But, like Cinderella, Bruges, eventually, in the twentieth century, found its prince charming: tourism. It is apparently the most visited city in the whole of Belgium (which, admittedly, is not a very big country). Indeed, as you walked from the railway station to the Markt, which, the tourist guide suggested, was the best place to start, there wasn’t much of the promised charm of “stagnant waters and mouldering walls”; and the streets, on which hordes of tourists—you were one of them— marched, were anything but “quietly melancholic”. The Markt essentially is a wide space beneath the mighty Belfry, although you wouldn’t suspect that, chock-a-block as it is with stalls of multicoloured awnings, selling an assortment of articles. And noisy. You hear lively arguments and clever bargaining all around you as you walk amongst the grubby stalls. It is a bit like, you imagine, working for the United Nations; almost no one speaks English. However, judging from the guffaws emanating all around you, the folk, here, are sharp-witted (unlike those in the United Nations).

You look around yourself. The Café is very Flemish in its style (As is only to be expected; the Flemish culture is for sale here). At the entrance is a stylish wooden porch. From the ceiling and walls hang brass lamps, and the walls are painted yellow. Some of the windows are stained glass—mostly of dull brown colour, making patterns you cannot not recognise. The façade on the outside of the building, however, appears to be neo-Gothic, which, you think, is slightly at variance with the interior, Flemish, décor.

An impossibly tall waiter with a caterpillar moustache and a slightly mad glint in his eyes had shown you to your table. The leather-bound menu is longer than the Treaty of Versailles, with overrepresentation of chips and salads. The waiter comes to take your order. You order a Croquet Monseigneur and ask him what fruit beers they keep. At this the waiter becomes melancholic, brings his mouth so near to yours that you can, if I wish (which you don’t), count the pores on his face, and he (if he so wishes, and he might well be) yours, and informs you that they have only one variety: Framboise. You hastily assure him that that would do. The beer arrives quickly enough. Not having anything better to do you browse through the menu again and discover a brief history of the café . The building, the menu informs  you, is very old although the neo-Gothic façade (you feel pleased that you’ve identified it correctly) was added in the late nineteenth century (why?). In the 12^th Century, a horse faced countess of a minor principality had watched the parade of the troops in the Markt-square, sitting on the first floor of the building. In 14th century, an archduke was given a grand banquet in this building. The archduke obviously survived the excesses, and, in later life spent a great deal of time and money (than was necessary) perpetuating his own memory, and wrote several (romantic) versions of his life, and that’s how the cafe, once a grand private house, and now a café—owned and run by the same family for over four decades—found its tiny niche in the history.

You are sitting very near to the bar. An elegant middle aged blonde with a baggy top that hides (what you imagine to be) big breasts is standing behind the bar and giving what appears to be a good bollocking to one of the waiters who stands staring sullenly at his toes. She must be the proprietor (or proprietoress), you decide. A middle-aged man wearing a suit is sitting with an unopened newspaper in front of him, a glass of beer in his hand, staring at the opposite wall, apparently in deep thought, though not, you suspect, of any purposeful description. An old man—well oldish—enters the café with his daughter. They sit at the table diagonally opposite to yours. He whispers something into his daughter’s ear who giggles girlishly, and his hand begins exploring her inner thighs, slowly making its way—as if it has a life all of its own—towards her crotch that makes you reconsider your first impression about their relationship. You suddenly become aware of a stench coming from my right, which you realise, is coming from an old woman who is wearing the most crumpled clothes in the history since a trunk was salvaged from the Titanic. The smell is a combination of boiled cabbages, a sinkful of unwashed dishes, a dog, and tobacco. You debate in your mind whether the smell is emanating from her body or her clothes or from both the sources. You conclude that you are not going to be able to come to a definite conclusion unless you went to where the old womanis slurping her beer (the smell could have been coming from her mouth) and took a lungful of the foetid air, which, you further concluded, you are not prepared to do. A young—well, youngish— couple enters the café with their toddler in tow. You remember seeing them on the train from Brussels. The child, when it was not running towards the door of the carriage with suicidal intention, was talking incessantly, most of which was gobbledegook, and the mother, instead of restraining it, was responding in the kind of baby-talk that you find most annoying, encouraging more gibberish from the child. The father, who wore a faded-blue baseball cap that probably was on his head every day and night for ten years, looked as though he was just about restraining himself either from pushing the child from the train or outrunning it to the carriage door and jumping out himself. The couple makes its way to a table to your left. The father still has his baseball cap on. You have a theory that men who wear baseball caps all the time are either bald or wankers or bald wankers. The child has lost its earlier sunny disposition and is whining something which only its mother understands. It is probably hungry. The husband removes his baseball cap: he is bald. You become aware of a presence next to my table. It is the waiter (who was bollocked by the proprietoress)) squinting at you as if he would have liked nothing better than to wring your neck. He bangs the plate on my table with as much violence without actually smashing it, muttering something under his breath which you cannot hear properly. You aren’t sure if he is saying the name of the dish you’d ordered or casting doubt on the virtue of your female relations.

‘Excuse me?’ you say.

There is an exaggerated sigh, and he says, “Ham sandwich.”

‘Is that the same as Croquet Monseigneur?’ you ask.

Either the waiter thinks it is beneath him to clarify the matter or he has exhausted his repertoire of English. He stares at you; you stare back at him. The waiter who had originally shown you to my seat comes and clarifies that the stale white bread swimming in oil is indeed what you had ordered. You order another bottle of Framboise. You take a mouthful of Croquet Monseigneur, and, unable to admit how vile it was, take another one, which forces me to believe what you do not want to. You decide to wait for the Framboise. You begin looking around. A young blonde wearing dangerously low cut jeans enters the restaurant and begins chatting with a middle-aged tosser sitting near the entrance of the restaurant. A smart, slim, bald man emerges from behind the bar and joins them. As he speaks he rests his palm on the young woman’s derriere. As you are trying to figure out the nature of the relationship between the two, the middle-aged blonde with the baggy top steps out and makes her way towards the group. She stands on the other side of the man, who puts his other palm on her posterior. You notice that the bald father of hyperactive child is also admiring the young woman’s jeans from behind. You decide that the three of them are family, the young woman being the daughter of the other two. This hypothesis receives a boost when the three of them walk back towards the bar. The bald man stops to tousle the hair of the toddler, who reciprocates by spitting out whatever it is eating at his tummy. The old geezer and the young woman (who is most definitely not his daughter (or, if she is, they have a very disturbing relationship) are in the middle of a very long and passionate kiss. “They should just go home and get on with it”, you think. Your beer arrives, and you renew your attack on the Croquet Monseigneur. The sandwich has the consistency of a wet towel and the oil burns your mouth like sulphuric acid. You think of all those less fortunate people than you, in Africa and Asia, who would run miles to wolf zestfully much less savoury objects, and who would, no doubt, embrace the sandwich with open molars. It is no good. You can’t continue without incurring the risk of corroding your bowels. You decide to leave. Before leaving you want to check the first floor of the establishment where the loos are located. Urinals occupy the whole of the first floor, except one door marked ‘Private’. As you relieve yourself slowly and forcefully you wonder idly whether the horse faced countess had watched, several centuries ago, from that very spot, the parade in the Markt. You conclude that it was unlikely, as the urinal is not facing the square.

You come down; pay the bill without a tip, and walk out into the Market Square.

Book of the Month: Four Girls from Berlin (Marianne Meyerhoff)

On a May morning in 1939, an ocean liner named St. Louis left Hamburg, Germany. Its destination was Cuba. It had 937 passengers on board—all of them Jews, hoping to escape the tightening Nazi noose around their necks. St. Louis was one of the last ocean liners that the Nazis allowed to leave Germany with its cargo of Jewish passengers. Within months of St Louis’s departure from Hamburg, the Second World War would begin that would close all avenues of escape for the German and European Jews.

The passengers aboard St. Louis thought they were lucky. Many had sold what remained of their life-savings—first to line the pockets of the Nazis, intent on fleecing Jews before they were sent into exile, and then the Cuban officials who demanded extortionate fees for landing permits—in order to ensure steamship passage. Many of the refugees also had U.S. quota numbers which they hoped would enable them to go to America.

When St Louis arrived in Havana, its passengers were horrified to learn that Cuban government had invalidated their landing permits. Cuba refused landing permission unless each of its passengers paid additional $ 500 for the visa. The passengers—most of whom had been forced to sell their possessions and homes for a fraction of their values—simply did not have the money.

St Louis laid anchor in Havana Bay and negotiations between the money-grabbing Cuban officials and Gustav Schroder, the captain of St. Louis, commenced, while the passengers—homeless, penniless and unwanted—waited with mounting panic and agitation.

The Havana Harbour Patrol as well as US Coast Guard cutters began circling St. Louis, warning away the passengers—most of them women and children—from entering Cuban or American waters.  Running low on fuel, Gustav Schroder, the heroic German captain of St. Louis, refused to return the passengers to further persecution and certain death in Germany. (After the war Schroder was awarded the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany; and, in 1993, posthumously, was named as one of the Righteous among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel.) Neither Cuba nor America was willing to accept the passengers who could have been easily absorbed as productive members of society of any country that was willing to accept them.

There then followed further squalid negations amongst Britain, France, Netherlands and Belgium about how they were going to divide the refugees, all of whom were Europeans. Finally, the European nations came to an understanding and the passengers were divided amongst these four nations.

As the theatre of war opened in Europe, only those passengers (a couple of hundred) who were granted asylum in England survived. Those who were accepted on the Continent most probably met the same fate as many of their co-religionists in Europe.

One of the passengers on St. Louis who was sent to Netherland and interred, first in Rotterdam and then in the Westerbork detention camp, was a German Jewish woman named Charlotte—‘Lotte’—Wachsner Meyerhoff. She was thought to have perished in the Holocaust. But she didn’t.

Four Girls from Berlin is the story of Lotte Wachsner Meyerhoff and her life in Germany, where her family had lived for almost two centuries, told by Lotte’s daughter, Marianne Meyerhoff. It is also a story of Lotte’s friendship with three other German, non-Jewish, women that survived the war.

Lotte was born in 1915 in Berlin, the first child of Fritz and Charlotte Wachsner. Charlotte died in childbirth and Lotte was named after her. She was raised by her mother’s best friend Paula whom her father married four years later. Lotte had a half-brother, Ernst, or ‘Mops’, who was five years younger than her.

Fritz Wachsner, a staunchly patriotic man who had fought for the Kaiser in the First World War, was a distinguished academician and held a professorial position at Berlin University. He was also a connoisseur of operas and Western classical music. In the 1920s not a week went by in professor Wachsner’s house when there wasn’t a concert. Lotte, his firstborn, was considered a prodigy: she was always first in all the subjects in the class. She also had a magnificent voice and her father –nicknamed Der Alte Fritz (Old Man Fritz) by ‘Mops’, which he pretended to take offence at—was determined that she would fulfil her potential. When Lotte turned 15, Fritz Wachsner deemed her ready to be groomed by a major teacher who would take her on for professional training. That teacher was Ilonka Von Patti. At Ilonka’s house Lotte met two other students: Erica Poch—who was a gifted pianist, and Ursula Bautze who aspired to be a painter. The three girls—all in their late teens—and their teacher, who was a decade older than them, formed a close bond over the next few years. This friendship would continue in the 1930s even as the atmosphere became vitiated by the anti-Semitic propaganda after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and the persecution and ostracization of Jews began. It even survived the Second World War. Or so Lotte thought; and her daughter, Marianne.

The memoir vividly brings alive for the reader the German Jewish life in the first of half of twentieth century. It also movingly describes the plight of this cultured, proud and patriotic family in the 1930s when the Nazis came to power in Germany. As one reads Professor Wachsner’s unflinchingly loyal views towards Germany even as draconian laws were in effect reducing Jews to sub-human levels one can only shake one’s head in disbelief at the misplaced patriotism. The writing was on the wall, but Fritz Waschsner refused to see it. His teenage son, ‘Mops’, unlike his father, knew where it was all heading. As early as 1935 he was exhorting his father to leave Germany and find a safe haven in another country. Fritz refused. It was inconceivable to him that he should leave the country he had called his home and leave behind a large clan that included his octogenarian mother and mothers-in law.  What was his advice to his son? "Keep your head down and don’t bring attention to yourself. This is a test of our patriotism and our country needs us now more than any time else." The response of professor Fritz to the horror unfolding in Germany is perhaps emblematic of the Jewish people of his generation: keep your head down, don’t make yourself too visible, and hope that you will be left alone. The trouble was the Jews were not going to be left alone; the new chancellor of Germany was determined to erase the Jewish race from the face of the earth, another thing professor Fritz and men of his generation simply could not envisage, even though Hitler had made his anti-Semite views clear in his autobiography a decade earlier. It was this passivity and inability (or reluctance) to think the unthinkable that saw thousands of cultured Jewish men and women march to their deaths; and in case of Frtiz Wachsner, also condemned the younger generation to wholly avoidable death.

Years later, while speaking to her daughter about that period (a rare occasion, as she avoided talking about it) Lotte said: ‘The Nazis took over and we began to feel in our bones Gleichschaltung. Mariane asked Lotte to translate the word into English. Lotte, who, despite decades of living in America had not quite mastered the foreign tongue and preferred to speak in her mother-tongue, German, had to consult German-English dictionary. She found that no equivalent word existed in English, and the closest translation was: ‘The forced and mindless joining in lockstep with the crowd.’

The sense of Gleichschaltung must have become acute for the Wachsners after the Anschluss and reports of widespread destruction of Jewish properties and synagogues in Vienna. And any doubts as to the intentions of the regime were removed on 9 November 1938 after Kristallnacht—when SA stormstroopers brought terror on the streets of Germany, wantonly destructing Jewish properties and synagogues. Fritz Wachsner was finally forced to confront the truth he was denying until then: the country he had called his home, where his family had lived for centuries, and in which Jews were fully integrated, the country for which he had fought 25 years earlier, was going to kill him and his family. But now it was too late, or almost too late. The once wealthy Wachsners were reduced to near penury, Fritz having lost his job. It was also clear that Fritz and his wife Paula would find it impossible to leave Germany because of their ages; in any case the family did not have enough money to pay for the fare of all of them. Lotte was hurriedly married to a German Jewish man named Russell Mayerhoff. The plan was: the newly-weds would leave Germany for Cuba and from there to America; from America they would arrange for the transport of the rest of the Wachsner family, including ‘Mops’ who  had wanted his father to leave Germany years earlier. ‘Mops’ was, by this time, 19. Of course it did not go according to plan at all, although Lotte managed to escape the detainment camp in Netherland (thanks to her father’s contacts and some brave Dutch who hid her in their house for several months), and arrived in America where in 1941 Marianne Meyerhoff was born. Her father, a restless soul, enlisted in the American army and returned to Europe to fight against what was until only a year earlier was his homeland. In the meanwhile Fritz and Paula carried on with their increasingly impoverished and precarious existence in Berlin, their suitcases packed—one for each—waiting for the knock on the door, which came one day in 1943. The last letter Lotte received from her beloved brother informed her that their parents had been ‘taken east’.  After that the correspondence stopped. Lotte died forty years later not knowing what happened to her brother. Marianne who, almost by accident, had found out the terrible fate of her uncle whom she had never met, simply did not have the heart to tell her mother.

Marianne Meyerhoff grew up in America, oblivious, initially, of her family’s history. A few months after the war ended they received a huge carton that had arrived from Germany. The carton was full of photographs, letters, and such personal belongings of the Wachsners as could be saved. It was then that Marianne Meyerhoff first became aware of the three Berlin friends of her mother. Soon the correspondence began between the old friends. Lotte Wachsner Meyerhoff, who was herself leading hand-to-mouth existence—her marriage to Russell Meyerhoff had broken down—sent parcels of food and chocolates to her friends back in Germany who were now facing starvation.

When she was in her 20s Marianne Meyerhoff visited Germany—a country where, in another reality, she might have been born and bred—for the first time, and met  all of her mother’s friends save Ilonka who had tragically passed on soon after the war. Upon arriving in Germany she fell acutely ill with life-threatening hepatitis and was nursed for several months by Ursula and her husband Bruno as if she were their own daughter. From Erica who was living in Berlin Marianne learnt how Ilonka and Erica—Ursula was in Africa with Bruno, who was a missionary, for the duration of the war—secretly visited her grandparents and supplied them with food on a weekly basis. The girls had taken a great risk in doing this, as by that time the regime had prohibited Aryans to have any relations with the Jews and the punishment for breaking the law was severe. She also learnt how Ilonka and Erica secreted out what they could from the apartment after the Wachsners were ‘taken East’ and ‘Mops’ went into hiding, and kept it hidden—another crime for which there were severe penalties—through the war. Thus started a friendship between Marianne and her mother’s friends. Erica had remained unmarried but Ursula had married and had several children. Marianne struck a close friendship with the wife of Ursulla’s youngest son, Jochin, which, in fullness of time, led to startling revelations about Ursula’s husband Bruno’s activities during the war.

The Four Girls from Berlin is a tragic tale of dreams shattered, family destroyed and people deracinated. Lotte Meyerhoff lived in Germany for the first 24 years of her life before she was violently uprooted and lost all her family. Months in the detention camp in Holland ruined her health, and this woman, for whom her academic father had great dreams, ended up leading an impecunious existence for most of her life. She eventually trained as a nurse; however health problems meant that she had to give even that up after a few years. She never sang again.

Lotte Meyerhoff never really felt at home in America, her adopted home for almost five decades where she breathed her last at the age of seventy. It was clear to her daughter that she hankered after the lost life in Germany; however she refused to return to Germany even for a visit even when her daughter urged her. The idea of returning to a country which was simultaneously a place of fond memories and indescribable sorrow and which ultimately had rejected her was obviously unbearable to her. She very rarely spoke about her life in Berlin, her family and friends, and such information as Marianne Meyerhoff gleaned was from other sources. Certain traumas stay with you for the rest of your life; the passage of time does little to heal the wounds.

It is also interesting that Marianne Meyerhoff was interested in finding out more about the mother’s side of the family and spent a lot of her adult life tracing those roots. Her father’s family, too,—his brothers and mother—perished in the Holocaust; however, beyond a couple of photographs of his father’s family in Germany and a paragraph which describes her father, as an American soldier in Germany, going back to the village where he was born and raised and discovering the horrific fates of his kin, there is no mention of the Meyerhoffs. One guesses that this has happened because the parents divorced when the author was very young; the father remarried (to a non-Jewish German woman whom he met in Germany) and raised another family; and, while he continued to live in America, was mostly absent when the author grew up. Lotte Meyerhoff did not remarry and, apart from her only daughter whom she raised on her own, had nobody. The author writes about her father (who, we learn, passed on a few years after her mother died) without bitterness; indeed she even goes to speculate that her parents were probably not temperamentally suited for one another and in ordinary circumstances would not have married.

A word about the prose style. As I began reading the book the prose seemed a bit flowery, self-consciously hyperbolic, and it jarred a bit; however, as I continued reading, I got into its rhythm and stopped noticing its peculiarities.

Lotte Wachsner Meyerhoff died in the 1980s. While clearing her house Marianne Meyerhoff came across a cache of letters Lotte must have received from her German friends at the end of the Second World War. Amongst them was a letter from her grandfather addressed to Marianne (which her mother had not shown her).  Fritz Wachsner was stranded in Nazi Germany when his only grandchild was born thousands of miles away in America. Fritz had two more years to live before he would make his final journey. As he wrote the letter Fritz would have known that he would not see his grandchild. It is quite extraordinary that the letter he wrote, under the shadow of death, was full of optimism for his grandchild’s future, and wished her all the happiness in the world. There was no mention at all in the letter of the appalling circumstances of his existence.

The quiet courage of Der Alte Fritz lingers in your mind long after you finish reading this moving memoir.

                                           The girl on the extreme right is Lotte Wachsner

Nom de Plume and a Furious J.K. Rowling

It is not easy being Joanne, as in Joanne—J.K.—, Rowling. In 2008 Rowling was named as the twelfth richest woman in the United Kingdom. She is also, in all probabilities, world’s richest author, with her fortune estimated at more than 500 million pounds, thanks to her phenomenally popular Harry Potter series of books, the first of which was published in 1997. Rowling went on to publish five (or is it six?) further squeals of the novel, all of which became super-duper hits, were made into films (where a wooden faced boy played the lead role, an ugly boy was his side-kick, and a pimply girl was his love interest) which, too, became hugely successful.

The Harry Potter books were phenomena. Children and their parents would queue outside the high street bookshops overnight to get their hands on the novels as soon as they were available. The target audience of these books was young teenagers. However, the novels also became hugely popular amongst many adults, at least in the UK. An ex-girlfriend and a long-term friend of mine were obsessed with the Harry Potter books and films, and would read and watch them (respectively) repeatedly. I would be repeatedly exhorted to give the books a try and labelled as snobbish for my persistent refusal to accede to the requests. In the end just to shut them up I read one of the books, which, it was put to me, was the “darkest” of the series, the implication being someone like me (even someone like me), who was a bit limited in his imagination, would find something of interest in this novel. The novel was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Don’t ask me what the novel was about; I don’t remember. If you belong to the legion of Harry Potter fans you’d probably know it already. The book was a waste of time. The story-line was not riveting. I guess all the books in the series follow the same theme: Harry has great powers of magic; he is some sort of messiah except that he does not know it (yet); the villains are after `him and he gets into some sticky situations; however, just as things begin to look a bit grim for him, he unleashes one of his crackerjack magic tricks and saves the day (yawn). If the subject matter was not enough to deaden the brain, the monotonously, hypnotically dreary prose put me into a trance; my brain just couldn’t work. When I informed my ex-girlfriend and friend that I found Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban less exciting than  Antique Road Show I was accused of being prejudiced. “Prejudiced about what?” I asked. “You are prejudiced against children’s literature,” the ex-girlfriend hissed. (She was a good hisser. She also liked to read, in addition to Harry Potter novels, fantasy fiction in which a twelfth century Zen master, who is adept at Kung Fu techniques Jackie Chan would give his right arm to learn, time-travels and lands in twentieth century Stafford-on-Avon; or underworld novels; or erotica of busty middle aged housewives in rural Norfolk who dream of rolling in the hay with the local pig-farmer while rubbing themselves senseless in the bath.) Not daring to voice the opinion that calling children’s books “literature” was a bit like describing eating  in your local MacDonald’s branch  as a Michelin star gourmet experience, I said, “That’s because it is written for children, and I am an adult.” “I rest my point,” the ex-girlfriend hissed adjusting (without much difficulty) her face in a position of sneer.

I haven’t read another Harry Potter novel, since. ‘Life is too short to read Harry Potter,’ I say if anyone asks me (no one does) if I have read "Harry Potter". (I have found that it is a good strategy to start any confession about omissions with ‘Life is too short to . . .’ It suggests that while you are ignorant, it is by choice; you are choosing to stay ignorant because the matter does not interest you; it is beneath your consideration; not because you are too thick to understand and therefore appreciate the matter; there are better, more important and more interesting, things clamouring for your attention.) These novels were written for young teenagers for a reason, which adults would do well to remember.

In 2007 Rowling published the last of the Harry Potter novels, and soon declared her intention to write novels for adults (which suggests that even she thought that the Harry Potter novels could only be enjoyed by those adults whose mental development was arrested at the age of eleven.)

In 2012 Rowling published Casual Vacancies, her first adult novel and the first novel since the Harry Potter series, under her own name. The book sold over a million copies despite the mauling it received from critics (what do they know, eh?) and has apparently been adapted by the BBC for a television series. I remember reading that Sikh religious leaders in India announced that they had received complaints from unhappy readers (presumably Sikhs) about Rowling’s portrayal of the character of a Sikh teenage girl in the novel. The girl is apparently described as a hirsute and with large mammaries. I do not know what it was that the Sikh religious leaders found offensive. (Maybe it is a physiological impossibility that Sikh women are big busted, or hirsute, as stipulated in the religious scriptures.) The Sikh religious leaders announced that they would carefully read the novel and determine whether the novel insulted their great religion; and, if it did, petition to the Indian government to ban the book in India. I don’t remember reading anything more on the matter (which suggests one of the following possibilities: (1) the Sikh religious leaders were satisfied that Rowling did not insult Sikhism despite the Sikh girl in the novel having big tits and abundant  facial hair; (2) the Sikh religious leaders began reading the novel and became suicidal themselves reading about the bleak England with myriad social problems such as drug abuse, rape, child abuse and poverty, and were advised to abandon the reading in the interest of their mental health; they were, therefore, unable to reach a decision as to whether their religion was insulted; (3) the Sikh religious leaders can’t read English and are waiting for a Punjabi translation to become available.)

In 2013 Rowling published a crime fiction novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling under the nom de plume Robert Galbraith. Why did Rowling decide to publish her novel under a pseudonym (and a male one at that)? It is tempting to think that after the global success of Harry Potter novels Rowling wanted to find out how a novel of hers which did not boast her name would be received. There is something in this theory. When a new novel by a successful author is published the hopes and expectations soar which, the author might think, conspire to the novel being unfairly treated, being (unfavourably) compared with the previous works of the author. (Apparently Casual Vacancies was unfavourably compared by some critics to Harry Potter novels, although quite how an adult novel dealing with grim and weighty social issues be compared with a fantasy children’s novel depicting the exploits of a boy wizard is unfathomable to me.) Maybe Rowling wished The Cuckoo’s Calling to be viewed on its own merit and not be hampered by its author’s world-wide reputation. (Perhaps Martin Amis could take a clue from this. It has become fashionable these days to pan a new Martin Amis novel, the consensus amongst the critics being Amis has not written anything worth reading since The Time’s Arrow.) It is also possible that Rowling wanted to find out how a new novel of hers under a different name would sell. I am sure many novelists would dearly wish to be in her position. You have earned so much money, you have become so wealthy, that you want to find out whether your new offering would sell without your name. You would want to find it out when you are in that happy position where it does not matter a jot, financially, whether your novel sells or not. 

Occasionally a writer might adopt a pseudonym when he writes a novel in a different genre. The 2005 Booker Prize winner John Banville published a crime thriller under the pseudonym Benjamin Black after his Booker victory. I heard Banville a few years ago in a literary festival. He said that he decided to write under a different name because he did not want his readers (both of them) to look for the same thing in his crime novel as in his literary novels, which, I thought, was a slightly overblown way of putting things. (Banville came across as a nice bloke; a little pleased with himself and utterly convinced about his place in the literature (top rung), but nice all the same.) In Banville’s case the pseudonym was announced publically (I think) around the time of the publication of his crime novel, and, if I am remembering correctly, the novel (Christine Falls) also mentioned that the name of the author was a pen-name of Banville (which, if you think of it, defeated Banville’s stated  purpose of using the pseudonym to manipulate readers’ expectations.) I suspect Banville, despite his numerous literary triumphs, is not in that happy position of not being bothered about whether or not his new novel sells; and the public announcement of his nom de plume, soon after his booker triumph, could have been an (understandable) attempt to cash in on the publicity.

So Rowling wrote a novel under a pseudonym. Why a male pseudonym? I read in WikiPedia that she was advised to drop Joanne from her name before the publication of the first Harry Potter book, apparently because it was felt that teenage male readers might not wish to read about a teenage boy wizard if the author was a woman; hence the gender-neutral initials J.K. It could be that the genre of crime novels is dominated by men, therefore Rowling chose a male pseudonym (which suggests that she was interested in the book selling; alternatively, she was taking every precaution that she would not be associated with the nom de plume).

Be that as it may The Cuckoo’s Calling was published earlier this year under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, and, not associated in any way with the author of the Harry Potter novels, attracted decent (if lukewarm) critical reviews, and sold very modestly. I read on the net that the novel was offered by Rowling’s agent, initially, to a different publishing house (from one that published Casual Vacancy). The publishing house rejected the novel. After this rejection the novel was offered by Rowling’s agent to Rowling’s own editor, who, thus, must have known about the identity of its author and, therefore, was unlikely to reject it. (Why did Rowling choose not to submit the novel anonymously to another publishing house instead of going straight to her regular publishers?  I guess there is only so much rejection one’s ego can take; and the thresholds differ.) 

Last month it was announced in The Sunday Times that Robert Galbraith, the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, was none other than J.K. Rowling.  Overnight the novel, promoted by Rowling’s publishers (Little Brown) as a “classic crime novel in the tradition of P.D. James and Ruth Rundell”, which had sold a few hundred copies in the UK and America until then (which apparently is a respectable number for a debut novel), jumped up 5000 places on the Amazon list and became number one best-seller on Amazon’s Kindle list; it also reached the number one position on other lists such as the print books list and the Barnes and Noble’s print list.

It would appear that Rowling was not planning to announce that she was Robert Galbraith when she was exposed by The Sunday Times, and was not hyperventilating  about the fate of her detective novel, which until then—there isn’t a kinder way to put this—had barely made a ripple. There was no conspiracy behind the outing of Rowling (famous author writes a book anonymously—sales are crap—author’s real identity is dramatically revealed). The truth was prosaic. A lawyer working in the law firm that represents a number of celebrities (Rowling amongst them) told the best friend of his wife, an idle housewife in Surrey, in a private conversation, that The Cuckoo’s Calling was in fact written by J.K. Rowling. The idle housewife then spilled the beans on twitter. (Why did she do it? She did it because she is an idle housewife. That’s what idle housewives do. They gossip; they babble; they spill the beans for the empty thrill it offers. Expecting idle, gossipy housewives and mothers to keep a secret is like asking Dawn French to look after your pie; it’s not going to happen. George Osborne, the loathsome British chancellor of Exchequer, said recently that women who choose to be housewives are making a life-style choice and should not be in receipt of child benefits. In light of the evidence provided by the idle housewife from Surrey I am inclined to think that there may be something in what this pasty, podgy, arrogant turdbag says.)

J.K Rowling was apparently upset (picturize her, if you can, slapping her hand on her forehead, as if the waiter had f**ked up her cocktail for the seventh time in a row); she was distressed; she was disappointed (picturize her, if you can, clucking her tongue, as if the John Dory she ordered was roasted a tad too much so as to render it a tad too dry); she was furious—more furious than an American footballer who has been called a pussy; she was very angry—madder than a factory full of hatters on acid. Here she was, luxuriating in the knowledge that, without the back up of her celebrity name, The Cuckoo’s Calling had sold less copies than a V.S. Naipaul novel; and now she was faced with the dreadful prospect of the novel becoming an overnight best-seller. Oh, the horror of it! The poor woman had no choice but to sue the lawyer, who had made the fatal error of letting the idle house wife from Surrey on the true identity of the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling, believing that she would keep the secret (more likely he was bragging, as they all like to do, I imagine, about their celebrity clients), and the idle housewife from Surrey. The firm, the lawyer and the idle housewife from Surrey apologized unreservedly; the firm agreed to meet Rowling’s legal cost (no bonus for the lawyer this year) and also pay damages to Rowling. Rowling announced that the damages received would be donated to a soldier’s charity as would be the royalties for the next three years (which is very generous, but shouldn’t she have donated the money to the victims and families of the victims, of countries, which happened to be rich in natural resources, to which Britain along with her master, America, decided to export democracy, which meant that British soldiers were forced to kill (very unfortunate) hundreds of thousands of civilians in collateral damages?).

In a statement Rowling said: “To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I had assumed that I could expect total confidentiality from Russells [the lawyer’s firm], a reputable professional firm, and I feel very angry that my trust turned out to be misplaced.”

One expects that the publishers (Little Brown) share Rowling’s sense of betrayal and outrage and are frothing at the mouth now that they have to commission 300,000 extra copies to keep up with the demand. A real kick in the teeth. (Kate Mills, publishing director of Orions, who rejected the novel, said that the novel was “perfectly good”, “certainly well written”, but “didn’t stand out”. I bet she is still happy about her judgment and is not at all ruing that her publishing company missed out on a blockbuster.)

You might wonder why Rowling thought she was entitled for compensation. She suffered no material loss as a result of this disclosure. If anything the sales of her novel received a boost when the idle housewife from Surrey babbled. (The idle housewife received no thanks for her kindness; into the bargain she—rather, one expects, her very annoyed husband, seeing as the woman is idle—has to cough up money to pay another idle woman (OK, she writes novels, but is that real work?) who is already worth hundreds of millions of pound and does not need the money. That should teach the idle housewife, the one who does not write novels, that is, a lesson. I’d suggest she find herself a job in the local county council library.) But, I guess, this is not about money. It is about Rowling’s entitlement to privacy, which was breached by the bragging lawyer and silly housewife. Imagine if you can the distress this revelation caused to the millionaire writer. It is not easy to recover from such a setback. It is very appropriate that Rowling received compensation.

What the whole affair proves, if proof be needed, is that being a writer of fiction is a very brave (or foolish) career choice. Chances are your work will not be accepted by publishing agencies if you are not an established author. If it does, chances are the book won’t sell .This is probably more true of literary fiction than genre fiction. (I find it significant that Rowling chose to publish the literary novel under her own name, but the crime fiction under a pen-name.)

To summarize: a famous author publishes a crime novel under a pseudonym. The novel sells moderately. Until the author’s name is leaked. The novel’s sales rocket. More publicity for the author (and her hitherto moderately selling novel).Then the author sues the persons who leaked her name and wins damages (more money). The author donates the money to a charity (the chief executive of which, I expect, will give himself (or herself; let’s not be gender-biased, here) a salary rise) and earns more brownie points.

J.K. Rowling might have been left speculating (as regards her novel written under a pseudonym) what might have been, what she wished had been, indeed, what would have been but for a boastful lawyer and gossipy housewife; and contrast it (ruefully, of course—because neither the windfall of sales nor more publicity is adequate compensation for the breach of trust and trauma caused to one's sensitive and delicate constitution) with what did happen. But I doubt it.

Book of the Month: Paper Houses (Michele Roberts)

The prolific British novelist Michele Roberts (once nominated for the Booker Prize for her novel, Daughters of the House), also the receiver of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts des et Lettres awarded by the French government, declares that she is a woman damaged by Catholicism. For most of her life, judging by her warts and all memoirs, Paper Houses, Roberts has tried to reject her Catholic upbringing, and, with it, the middle class Tory values of her parents. Roberts’s father had a working class background; however, the family had become middle class when Roberts and her siblings grew up.

When Roberts returned to London after finishing her degree course in Oxford, at the start of the 1970s, her aim, to begin with, was to train as a librarian. However, much to her parents’ dismay, she gave up on the idea and announced that she was going to earn her living by writing (the young Roberts believed that she had a flair for poetry). She also hurled herself into the Bohemian lifestyle embraced by many young men and women from middleclass backgrounds. This involved, based on the evidence supplied by Roberts, living in squats, holding ultra-leftist feminist views, joining marches and demonstrations against the Capitalists, contributing to radical magazines, participating in Street theatres, smoking dope and (occasionally) snorting cocaine, letting one’s hair down in wild parties, and sexual promiscuity aplenty.  There is rather a lot of sex in the book, as Roberts informs the readers about her various sexual exploits. By her own admission, Roberts did not learn to come for a long time and worried that she might be frigid. However, once she learned how to, she laid down her carpet, so to speak, for the inspection of a cavalcade of men and women. It was all, one supposes, part of experimenting with freedom and a desire to push the envelope, engendered by the liberal values prevailing at the time. Roberts, to her credit, has avoided falling into the trap of overdoing it. Thus, when she narrates an incident, where a fellow commune member and husband of one of her friends, in a sexual experiment, makes Roberts and another woman lie on his either side and fingers their clitorises,  if the intention was to titillate, it is expertly camouflaged by the matter of fact tone. Curiously, for a writer avowedly big on workings of the mind—there are countless references to Roberts ‘diving’ into her unconscious to procure material for her fiction—her responses to the sexual encounters are banal and clichéd.  This is not to suggest that Roberts is dissimulating when she says she enjoyed sex, nor that she should have invested the encounters with feelings she did not experience; it is just that Roberts, who analyses everything—to death, you might be excused for thinking at times—is content to luxuriate in superficialities (‘I thoroughly enjoyed it’) while describing her responses to sexual acts which pop up on every other page in the first half of her book. In the memoir Roberts recounts her own struggles with breaking the taboos and talks, deftly blending Freudian psychology with her Catholic upbringing (which she found repressive) about the disapproving ‘Mother Superior of her mind’, repeatedly chastising her and stifling her creativity for a long time by telling her that she was wicked and no good. Perhaps the punitive superego is still at work. Towards the end Roberts turns overtly analytical and—probably from the knowledge indirectly gleaned through her own therapy—analyses her relationship with her father, and arrives at the (not altogether surprising) conclusion that what she must have really wanted to do was to have a physical relationship with him.

In a literary event, promoting the memoir, Roberts described herself as a flaneur. There is certainly a lot of flaneuring in the memoir. The bits where Roberts describes her explorations of the city are the most enjoyable, not least because Roberts’s love for London, her home for well over three decades, which shines through these reminiscences. The quaint pubs and cafes, her stays in cheap rooms in parts of London which were far-flung in those days (and where local men had a strong tendency to regard young women walking alone as either lesbians or on the game; Roberts, it would appear, could not walk more than a few steps without being subjected to lecherous comments, just because she neglected to wear a brassiere) are brought to life brightly and distinctly. The reader marvels at the intensity and acuity of these recollections as Roberts describes with great vividness minutiae. (While describing an impromptu beach picnic she once had with one of her innumerable friends Roberts remembers that her breasts popped out of her skimpy top every time she rowed).

Paper Houses is a candid memoir of an intelligent, idealistic, creative, emotional person who lived through the heady days of left-wing politics in the seventies. The young Roberts, working for outré magazines of the counterculture like Spare Rib and Oz, was convinced that she was part of a revolution that would change the world. Written in the first person singular and in past tense, the emotions and thinking process are those of a young Roberts, raw and unanalyzed. It is to the credit of the older, mature, Roberts that she has not allowed hindsight to cast its retrospective influence and distort the naive idealism of her younger self which attempted to be a revolutionary feminist, novelist, poet, street theatre actor, and a bibliophile, all at the same time. Roberts was trying her best to break out of the comfortable, middle-class background, yet all her endeavours, as she is frank and honest enough to admit, were cas typique bourgeois.  When she worked in Clerkenwell, her  fellow workers, all working class women from Essex, viewed Roberts’s endeavours with a mixture of amusement and contempt: they thought  feminism was “something for middle-class chicks wanting to get into the middle-class men's world”.  For her fellow members in the various radical households she lived in, Roberts was not radical enough: they considered her “too wide-eyed and emotional” and pooh-poohed her writing aspirations as bourgeois individualism.

Roberts strives hard—too hard, you suspect—to give the impression of a person full of joi de verve. The sheer number of friends and acquaintances who appear in the memoirs is bewildering—there are so many of them, and they pop up every so often, that it is a bit difficult to keep a track. Thus, when on page 250, say, a character, say, Joe, appears, you suspect, given the familiarity with which Roberts speaks of him, that he has appeared somewhere earlier in the memoirs; but when and where? In a way it does not matter. Such is the pace and momentum of Roberts’s narrative that the reader is tempted to just go with the flow. The writing is highly impressionistic and the reader does not get insights into the workings of the minds of the procession of characters that appear; they remain, all the time, supporting characters in the big, exciting drama of Roberts’s life. You wonder whether the people were more complex and multilayered than Roberts’s breezy, passing impressions suggest. Even, the two ex-husbands—who feature prominently in Roberts’s account of her two failed marriages—remain sfumato.

Paper Houses is a quaint, nostalgic reflection on the milieu which contributed to the development of one of the important novelists of our generation. Roberts emerges from this narration as a thoughtful, perceptive and generous human being, although you wonder whether underneath all the chutzpah, (deceptively) breezy prose and wassailary tone lurk stygian emotions. 

Chimamanda Adichie Rips into V.S. Naipaul

I came across this news item by chance. My attention was immediately arrested by its headline: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie rips into V.S. Naipaul.

My first thought was: what has he done now? The 2001 Nobel Laureate of literature is not known for mincing his words on a variety of subjects including (but not limited to) literary giants of the English literature. He has more opinions about them than I have got hair on my head. In his old age he seems to take great pleasure in skewering people. (And after he has skewered them, he marinates them in vinegar and puts them on the barbecue to bubble.) He once described Passage to India as ‘pretence’ and ‘utter rubbish’, and added for good measure (just in case there was a doubt in anybody’s mind) that its writer (E.M. Forster, who was of homoerotic orientation) went to India to exploit poor sexually. (I have not read any biography of E.M. Forster, so I do not know whether Naipaul formed his opinion based on his extensive study of Forster’s biographies or from his personal acquaintance with Forster where Forster confessed his true intentions behind his visit to India to Naipaul,  or whether he had an epiphany. I have not read Passage to India, but have read Howard’s End and A Room with a View, both of which tried my patience beyond endurance; tedious does not even come close to describing these two novels. I have therefore some sympathy for Sir Vidia’s view of Passage to India.) In a long interview he gave to Paris Review years ago (at the end of which declared that he disliked giving interviews—he is a bundle of contradiction, Sir Vidia) Naipaul was dismissive of Jane Austen: he told the interviewer that he wondered to what he was doing reading (i.e. wasting his time, I think) novels of this woman (or something to that effect; I am quoting from memory). Years later, at the Hay festival he said that he couldn’t possibly share Austen’s sentimental view of the world, which predictably raise the hackles of many in the UK (including many women bloggers who became very emotional about it) where Austen is placed on a pedestal  and Pride and Prejudice remains a very popular novel.

Therefore, when I read the headline which informed that Adichie had metaphorically ripped into Naipaul, I briefly wondered whether he had made some ill-advised remarks about Adichie (or her novels), the rising star from Nigeria, or African writers, or Africa.

I was wrong.

This time round we can’t blame the old curmudgeon of sniping at others (without provocation). If anything it was the other way round. It was Adichie, who, as the headline mentioned, ripped into the octogenarian author without provocation.

It relates to the Orange Prize winner’s most recent novel: Americanaha. According to the report the black protagonist of the novel expresses severe views about V.S. Naipaul and his novels. The novel that is chosen for particular derision is A Bend in the River, which is routinely selected in various lists of Greatest Books Ever Written, 1001 Books You Must Read before You get Demented, If You haven't read these Books You should Kill Yourself etcetera etcetera. The novel was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980 (but didn’t win it). The black protagonist of Americanaha, upon being informed by a white character in the novel (who believes itself to be liberal) that A Bend in the River is the most honest novel it (the character) has ever read about Africa, decides enough is enough. The praise for A Bend in the River is the last straw; time to call spade a spade, no more tolerance of intellectual claptrap. A Bend in the River is not about Africa at all, the black protagonist informs. What is it about then? The novel is set in an unnamed African country (which many believe to be DR Congo) and its maniacal, unhinged, despotic dictator (who, some believed, was based on the maniacal, unhinged and despotic dictator, Mobutu, although it has shades of Idi Amin, another clinically insane and despotic dictator). It might be set in Africa, but is Africa in it? At a superficial level, yes, seeing as the novel (though narrated by the protagonist who is of Indian extraction) is teeming with Africans. The novel, opines the black protagonist of Americanaha, is about Europe; it is, the black protagonist puts to the white liberalist, about the longing of Europe; it is, preaches the black protagonist, about “the battered self-image of an Indian man born in Africa, who felt so wounded, so diminished, by not being born a European . . .”

Who is the wounded man the fictional character in Americanaha animadverts about? Let’s investigate. Could it be Salim, the fictional character in A Bend in the River? Salim is a Muslim of Indian extraction who is born and raised in the unnamed African country. So he meets the first the first half of the description: an Indian man born in Africa. Does Salim think himself to be different from the Africans in the country? Yes. At the beginning of the novel he identifies his family as belonging to a "special group". He sees himself as distinct from the Africans. Whom does Salim identify with? Europeans? No. The east coast of Africa where Salim’s family has lived for “centuries”, is, according to Salim, not truly African. It is an “Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese” place. Does Salim show longing for Europe at any time in the novel? No. The character of Salim, you might say, is representative of how I think (having read a few of the books by and about him) V.S. Naipaul views history: “an interplay of various peoples, and it’s gone on forever.” Salim does not strike you as a character that is grievously wounded because he was not born a European.

I don’t think the black protagonist of Americanaha has Salim, the Asian protagonist of A Bend in the River, in her mind when she talks of the Indian man diminished by not being born in Europe. Could the protagonist have had the creator of Salim in her mind? It may not be as farfetched as it might seem at first instance. Naipaul has been frequently accused by his detractors of being anti-African (which, seeing as he is not African himself clearly translates as a racist). Derek Walcott, another Nobel Laureate from the Caribbean, put it bluntly that “Naipaul does not like Negroes.” (A few years ago, in a literary festival in one of the Caribbean islands, Walcott read out a poem he had written, devoted in its entirety to trounce Naipaul. What does that say about Walcott? Naipaul didn't respond to this as he has not responded to any of the personal attacks on him; come to think of it he does not bother to defend his work against the criticism levelled at it.) It has become fashionable these days to rebuke Naipaul as a writer of neo-colonialist leanings. In case you think Naipaul dislikes only the blacks, let me advise you that he is considered a Muslim-hater, too. Salman Rushdie once described Naipaul as a “traveller of fascism” who had disgraced the Nobel award. Finally, there is always Edward Said who could be relied upon to say something venomous against Naipaul, just as you can rely upon the sun to rise in the east.

I think the tragically wounded man pining for Europe the fictional character in Americanah is referring to is V.S. Naipaul.

That’s alright, you might say. It is a fictional character, after all. It does not really exist. The murderous and murdering psychopath in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is a gushing fan of Whitney Houston, and a whole chapter in the novel is devoted to the protagonist extolling the virtues of Houston. That does not make Whitney Houston a great singer. (I mean she was a great singer, one of the best; but she isn’t great because a fictional character in a work of fiction gives her endorsement.) The opinion of the fictional character in Americanaha is, like, her opinion; and she is not even real. Does it matter? Why should we take seriously the views of someone who exists only in someone else’s head about V.S. Naipaul (who exists in his own right)?

Does the opinion of the fictional character in Americanah about Naipaul reflect the opinion of its author?

 It probably does.

Adichie, while promoting the novel in the UK, told a newspaper:

“I have become very tired of this nonsense where he [Naipaul] is supposed to be the best writer in the world. God bless him and I wish him the best, but I think that just because you are an old man who is nasty doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t actually take apart your work.”

Like the protagonist of her novel Adichie has had enough. No more of this claptrap that Naipaul is the best author in the world and A Bend in the River is a great novel. She doesn’t care if he is old and nasty. She will tell the world what Edward Said forgot to mention.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and Adichie is entitled to hers. One can also see why Naipaul gets under the skin of many who insist on clinging to the delusion—no doubt out of colonial guilt—that everything about the European Empires were despicable and the best thing that happened to the colonies was that the colonialists left. The colonialists were bastards; they exploited the colonies, siphoned off the wealth, and reduced its citizens to subhuman level in their own countries; they were finally kicked out and everything is hunky-dory; everything is shipshape; its paradise in the former colonies, now. The reality, sadly, can’t be so neatly pigeonholed. In many parts of the world, most notably in Africa, decolonization was followed by failures of epic proportions. While there may be reasons for that and the imperialists have a lot to answer for the role they played, it does not change the fact that for many in the post-colonial world true liberation remains a distant dream as the countries hover on the brink of disaster.

That’s what Naipaul has depicted in some of his fiction and non-fiction. I am not going to review in this post A Bend in the River, which—I am not sure that it is the most honest novel about Africa; it is a view of Africa (if one can generalize from the unnamed country which is the setting for A Bend in the River), by a Muslim man who, while he is born in Africa considers himself as separate from the prevailing culture, that is an outsider—remains one of my very favourite novels. It is a blunt, brutal novel which is bleak in the extreme in its outlook. At one point in the novel, one of the supporting cast of characters says:

“Nobody's going anywhere. We're all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We're  being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad....”

The world is, as the celebrated beginning of the novel says, what it is. Naipaul didn’t make it. He simply records what he sees (without concerning himself excessively about niceties and political correctness). It no doubt makes an uneasy reading; but it is not necessarily a fallacious view. Somerset Maugham once said that the best frame of mind to face the world was of humorous resignation. Naipaul's  view of the world (which is very pronounced in his later work) is of nihilism and sardonicism. And such is the power of his narrative that you soon get comfortable with despair; you don’t want things to be good.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a young talented writer. I haven’t read her Orange Prize winner, Half of Yellow Sun, but I liked her debut novel, The Purple Hibiscus, a lot, almost as much as Things Fall Apart from which it seemed to have taken its inspiration. I am sure she will go on, in fullness of time, to achieve more accolades. Her novels will (unlike many of Naipaul’s) sell, and she will not feel the need to resort to cheap gimmicks like attacking a writer (the best writer of English in the world) to boost the sells of her novel.

                     He looks like a sweet old grandfather; he can't be nasty

Book of the Month: The Young Che (Ernesto Guevara-Lynch)

More than forty years after his violent death in the jungles of Bolivia Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara remains an iconic figure in the world history of the twentieth century. The man who met his death in a remote corner of the world with cheerful insouciance would have appreciated the irony that in his death he has become a figure of inspiration to many in the Capitalist world, a system he despised and which he was attempting to overthrow in Bolivia using violent, guerrilla tactics, when he was captured and killed.

The fascination with the life of Fidel Castro’s first Minister for Industries is endless. Ten years ago the movie The Motorcycle Diaries, based on a journey of Latin American countries Guevara undertook with his friend Alberto Granado, was released to great critical acclaim and, if my memory serves me right, won an Oscar. (Granado was a life-long friend of Che Guevara, and the movie was based on his and Che Guevara’s travel diaries. Granado’s diaries, Travelling with Che Guevara, were published in English for the first time in 2003, following the success of the film. Granado immigrated to Cuba in 1961, where he went on to become professor of medical biochemistry in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Havana).

In 2007 was published, for the first time in English, The Young Che: memories of Che Guevara. The book is an amalgamation of two books, originally published in Spanish, in the 1980s. It achieves poignancy (in the minds of readers so inclined) because it was written by Che Guevara’s father, also called (to confuse matters a bit) Ernesto Guevara, although he went by the hyphenated surname, Guevara-Lynch (his mother was of Irish descent). Henceforth, in this review, to avoid confusion, Ernesto Guevara, the revolutionary, would be referred to by the nickname with which his revolutionary comrades called him and he is widely known: ‘Che’ (we learn from the book that ‘Che’ is an expression generally used in Latin America to refer to people from Argentina, as it is apparently an interjection with which they often pepper their conversation); while his father, the writer of the memoirs, will be referred to as he was probably always known in his life: the hyphenated surname—Guevara-Lynch.

The original Spanish memoirs were published in 1981 and 1987 respectively, the second posthumously.

The memoir traces young Che Guevara’s life in Argentina to the point where he departs for Cuba to take part in Castro’s revolution. The epilogue, written by Che Guevara’s friend from his medical school, Tita Infante, a year after his death, adds poignancy to the memoir. (Infante toyed with the idea of immigrating to Cuba after Castro’s revolution, but didn’t, a decision she regretted in later life; she committed suicide in 1976).

Based extensively on the personal letters Che Guevara wrote to his parents, the memoir throws into sharp relief the kind of person the man—who, in 1961, published Guerrila Warfare—A Method—was in his childhood, teens and youth.

Guevara-Lynch probably began writing the memoir in the 1970s (the English language book has a foreword from him dated 1972-1973.) By that time his son’s place in the cannons of left-wing revolutionary history was assured. The father seems very aware of the status of his dead son when he writes the memoir. He informs the reader that he himself was left-wing leaning in his politics, so it wasn’t as if he had to do a great deal of ideological acrobatics to accommodate and extol the views of his son. Where Che Guevara differed, one guesses, from his father was: whereas the father was content to express his outrage to friends and families at what he saw as repeated interference by the Capitalist USA in internal affairs of several Latin American countries, rich in natural resources (where CIA-engineered coups overthrew popular, Socialist governments and put in place puppet dictators), he did not see as his job to actually do anything about it. His middle-class Socialism was within the perimeter of his middle-class life-style.

Che Guevara was not content with merely chattering about the Capitalist outrages. He joined hands with Fidel Castro and overthrew the Cuban dictatorship of Batista.

Does the memoir throw any light on—to put it clichédly—what made Che Guevara Che Guevara? Not really. Much as you try to understand, there is nothing in Guevara’s childhood, no one single seminal event that  one can say  set him on the path which, in 1967, ended in the Bolivian jungles. If anything, there was everything in his illustrious and affluent family background that should have set him comfortably in life. And it wasn’t as if he grew up hating everything that his family stood for. According to the memoir, Che Guevera had a very secure and happy—you could say ordinary—childhood; and throughout his brief life he remained very close to his family.

Che Guevara’s great-grandfather (from his father’s side), Francisco Lynch, in the 19^th century, left Buneos Aires for Uruguay, along with several of his relatives, because he did not want to live under the dictatorship of General Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1852). Francisco eventually landed in California where he amassed a fortune. Che Guevara’s other paternal great-grandfather, Juan Anonio Guevara, was a direct descendent of the founders of the city of Mendoza; his was the ninth generation of Guevaras born in Argentina, although the family came originally from Chile. Juan Antonio Guevara, too, was bitten by the gold bug, and travelled to California from Mexico on a horseback. Unlike Che Guevara’s other great-grandfather, the Californian venture turned out to be a failure for Juan Antonio Guevara, and he returned to Argentina with wife and children, amongst them Roberto Guevara, Che Guevara’s paternal grandfather. Che Guevara’s mother, Celia de la Serna, also came from an extremely rich family, her father having inherited a vast fortune. Her father owned several ranches; he was also a successful lawyer and was professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Buneos Aires. Guevara remained very close to his mother until her death (Celia de la Serna had the good fortune of predeceasing her son by a couple of years, whereas his father outlived him by several years), and she, in turn, had special affection for her eldest child. After the successful revolution in Cuba, of which Che Guevara was one of the architects, Celia learned about her son’s revolutionary politics and ideas, and came to understand his thinking in depth. She began, in the 1960s, to travel to Brazil and other Latin American countries, giving lectures on the logic and justice of the Cuban revolution.

Che Guevara’s father, Ernesto Guevara-Lynch, was a trained architect. In 1926, ‘quite by accident’, Guevara-Lynch got the opportunity to develop 70,000 hectares in Alto Parana (a happy accident if there was one), in the territory of Misiones. Che Guevara was born in Misiones and it was there that he spent the first two years of his life.

As a child Che Guevara suffered from life-threatening attacks of asthma, which remained a great cause of concern for his parents throughout his childhood. As one reads of the endless nights the parents spent, sitting next to young Che, the various specialist opinions they sought, and the different locations within Argentina to which the family moved—resulting in considerable interruptions in his father’s jobs, not to mention financial strains of the frequent moves—in search of climate which they hoped would suit young Che, a picture emerges of a closely knit, loving family, with doting parents, who were prepared to do everything for their child. Years later Che Guevara, while studying medicine, would develop special interest in allergic conditions, and the interest was perhaps rooted in the childhood malady.

Che Guevara was only a boy when the Spanish Civil war started. However, the family was close to some of the Republican exiles, in particular General Enrique Jurado, the hero of the battle of Guadalajara. General Jurado visited the Guevara-Lynch family and often regaled them with stories of the civil war. Little did Guevara-Lynch realise that the delicate, asthmatic boy, listening intently to the general’s stories would, one day, command his own troops.

Che Guevara was an intelligent, precocious child. He was also—his father recalls—‘deeply attracted to danger’. He actively sought danger and seemed to enjoy overcoming it. When the family was living in Alta Gracia (in the region of Cordoba), Che Guevara used to go for walks with his friends, one of them Alberto Granado. According to a story Granado told Guevara-lynch (after Che Guevara’s death), a favourite sport of Che Guevara during these walks was to balance himself on the ledge of a railway bridge, which was about twenty meters high, above a stream and hang on with his hands, with his legs above his head and his back to the abyss. If there were girls in the group he would take even more risks. Knowing as you do the sensational trajectory Che Guevara’s life took, you wonder whether incidents such as these were harbingers of the things to come.

As an adolescent Che Guevara had a wide circle of friends from all social strata. He was loyal to his friends. He apparently did not enjoy large social gatherings, as he was reserved by nature. He was also a poor dancer and did not much care for music; but he enjoyed small parties where young men and women were present. He had a stubborn streak in him and, even though he continued to experience violent attacks of asthma—which concerned his father—, participated regularly in rugby, and excelled.

In 1947 Che Guevara informed his parents that he wanted to study medicine. His grandmother, to whom he was very close, was terminally ill at the time, and according to Guevara-Lynch, the decision to join medicine had to do with her illness. Throughout his years in the medical school, Che Guevara also occupied himself full-time with various activities, yet he managed to pass all the exams at first attempt. He did not need to swot for exams; academic achievements, it would appear, came easily to him. Around this time he also started working in the laboratory of a specialist in allergies and who had in fact treated him for his asthma when he was young. After he qualified, Doctor Ernesto—‘Che’—Guevara presented a couple of papers in international medical conferences. When he passed his final medical exam and obtained his degree, the first person Che Guevara phoned was his father. Guevara-Lynch was in his studio when the phone rang. When he picked up the phone, a voice which he recognised immediately announced with obvious pride that it was Doctor Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. The emphasis was on the word ‘doctor’.

When you read Guevara-Lynch’s memoir, the one impression that is left on your mind is that his son was a restless soul. It was not in his nature to sit back and enjoy the comforts that surely his profession (and possible inheritance) would have made it possible. Novelty seeking was a deeply ingrained in his temperament and if that meant facing hazards and danger, then it was a small price to pay for the thrill and enjoyment the derring-dos offered. In the memoir we learn that before his motorcycle journeys across Latin America with his friend Alberto Granado (made into the film The Motorcycle Diaries), Che Guevara bicycled across 14 provinces of Argentina.

If the family had any hopes that Che would settle into medical practice after obtaining his medical degree, they were dashed when he announced that he was embarking on another trip, this time, to Bolivia and Peru. This is how Guvera-Lynch records his emotions when Che informed him of his forthcoming trip:

‘He [Che Guevara] was no longer a child, he was Dr Guevara de la Serna, and he would do as he pleased. All we could do now was learn to grin and bear it and try to help him as much as possible—something that he nearly always turned down.’

Guevara-Lynch arranged a big farewell party for Che and on a cold afternoon in July 1953, Che Guevara boarded the train for Bolivia. The family would not see him for the next seven years. When they finally met him in 1960, Che Guevara was Minister of Industries in Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba.

As the train pulled off, Che Guevara shouted at his waving parents and friends: ‘Here goes the soldier of the Americas’. At the time Guevara-Lynch did not pay any attention, believing it to be another eccentricity of his son. Little did he know.

Che Guevara travelled to Bolivia because he wanted to witness, first-hand, the revolution that was allegedly in progress and which was expected to topple the government of Paz Estenssoro. The memoir directly quotes from the diaries Che Guevara kept during this period. (It would appear that although Che Guevara never actually practised medicine, concerning himself, instead, with toppling governments, he was very doctor-like in at least one respect: his handwriting was indecipherable.) Che Guevara’s letters to his father from Bolivia show that the sharp-minded future revolutionary needed only a few days to understand the socio-political problems faced by Bolivia. He also immersed himself in Argentine politics by lively discussions with the exiles (opposed to the rule of Peron). From Bolivia Che Guevara travelled to Peru (disappointed that he did not have time to stay back and witness the armed revolt he was certain would take place against Estenssoro).

The country, the stay in which probably firmly pushed Che Guevara towards Communism, was Guatemala. Che Guevara arrived in Guatemala via Panama and Costa Rica, in 1954. A letter Che wrote to his maternal aunt (to whom he was very close), from San Jose, Costa Rica, gave his family for the first time an idea as to his political thoughts. He declared that the capitalists were ‘terrible’ and went on to inform the aunt (who was not at all a Communist sympathizer) that he had ‘sworn in front of an image of old and much-lamented Comrade Stalin’ that he would not ‘rest until I see these capitalists crushed.’ According to Guevara-Lynch, Che Guevara enjoyed a close and informal relationship with his aunt and the tone of many of his letters to her was deliberately alarming, but also written in a manner that was almost tongue-in-cheek. However, in the same letter came a sentence, towards the end, which the family took no notice of at the time, but which seemed portentous to Guevara-Lynch as he sifted through Che’s letters when he began writing the memoir after his death. Che Guevara wrote:

 ‘I will perfect my skills in Guatemala and I will achieve what I still lack in order to be an authentic revolutionary.’

This was also the first letter of the time in which Che no longer mentioned medicine; instead the letter was full of his observations on the social and political situation of the poor and oppressed peoples.

In Guatemala Che also met the woman who became his first wife. Her name was Hilda Gadea. She was a Peruvian economist, a political exile (for her left wing views) following the military coup in Peru by General Manuel Odria. Gadea worked at Guatemalan Institution for the Promotion of Production.

Gadea would be Che Guevara’s companion (and wife) for a few years; the marriage would produce one daughter; and they would part on friendly terms.

In Guatemala, Che wasted little time in getting intimately involved in the political turmoil in the region. At the time United Fruit, a powerful banana company, dominated the Guatemalan economy. As Che Guevara saw it, the company, backed by the power of the United States had ‘total power’ over people. Che, who was not a native Guatemalan, positioned himself, politically, with the Guatemalan government of President Arbenz, of which the Communist party of Guatemala (it called itself Workers’ Party of Guatemala) was a member. He wrote long letters to his parents about his assessment of what was going on in the country. What was going on was a coup. Coup was in the air. Castillo Armas, with the support of the USA, invaded Guatemala from Honduras, toppling the Socialist government of Jacobo Arbenz. Che was in Guatemala when the coup took place and briefly asked for an asylum at the Argentine embassy. He left the country after the fall of Arbenz, for Mexico, convinced in his mind that there was only one way to resist what he saw as America’s aggressive capitalism in the region; and that was not Gandhi’s peaceful non-cooperation. Hilda, whom Che Guevara referred to as his companera (companion) in his letters to his parents (and only towards the end of his stay in Guatemala), stayed back and was jailed. She was eventually released because of her Peruvian nationality, but only after a lot of suffering.

During his stay in Guatemala, Che Guevara met with many important people, one of whom was Dr Arnesto Bauer Paiz, who at the time was President of the National Agrarian Bank of Guatemala. Years later, this is how Professor Bauer remembered Che Guevara:

‘He was a young doctor, but did not look like one, but rather like a student, restless and cheerful . . . The meeting was animated not just because of Ernesto’s conversational skills, but because of the subjects broached as well.  . . . If I am to speak with total candour . . . Ernesto and I, although quite influenced by Marxist ideology, still had certain political ideas that were populists . . .’

When he left Guatemala for Mexico, Che Guevara sent his parents a box that contained more than 100 of his books. The majority of the books dealt with the social and political aspects, but there were also books on subjects such as statistics, economics and geography.

Going through the scores of letters Che Guevara sent to his family from this period, years after his death, his father was struck by the jaunty, chatty and amusing tone of them. He (the father) was also forced to conclude, with the benefit of hindsight, that his son, deliberately or otherwise, had not given his family any indication of the turn his life was about to take. The family continued to fondly believe—rather hope—that Che’s interest in the politics of the Central and Latin Americas would not take over his life and that he would return to Argentina in due course to start his medical practice.

The subterfuge would continue in Mexico.

Che Guevara arrived in Mexico in September 1954 and, to make ends meet, became a street photographer. This section of the memoir includes some letters Che wrote to his friend from his medical school, Tita Infante. He concludes one of the letters as follows, which gives you an idea of the kind of person he was:

‘Going back to the uncomfortable subject of advice I will give you my last: always throw fears overboard because they complicate matters. It is always better to have the bitter-sweet taste in your mouth of a frustrated yearning than an unfounded image of what might have been.’

In his letter to his parents Che wrote that he was getting involved in two pieces of medical research. He also declared his intention to write a book. He had thought of the title of this book: The Function of the Doctor in Latin America. He then remarked, tongue in cheek, that he could speak with some authority on the subject because, although he did not know a lot about medicine, he had Latin America well sussed out. Che Guevara never wrote the book on the functions of a doctor in Latin America; instead he wrote a book on the guerrilla warfare.

The letters from Mexico were full of rant against the USA. Che Guevara had concluded that the Mexican government was in the pocket of the Americans. There were grave prognostications for Mexico’s future. (‘In Mexico there are practically no independent industries and even less free trade. This country is heading for total disintegration and I am not exaggerating; the only way you could make any money here would be by being a pimp for the Americans.’)

There was also some admittance, albeit indirect, in these letters, that he had probably been a disappointment to his parents. Che concluded one of the letters to his father with the observation: ‘I have grown tired of talking nonsense and you of reading it.’  In another letter, this time to Tita Infante, he called himself ‘a first class failure, scientifically speaking’.

Then the tone and content of Che Guevara’s letters to his parents changed, giving hope to them that perhaps all was not lost. He informed them that he had won a scholarship at the General Hospital of the Mexico. This was followed by another letter which told the parents that his hospital post was going well and that he was working in the laboratory of the hospital doing allergy research. He was now working with the ‘top man of allergy in Mexico’, Dr. Salazar Malan. He indicated to his parents that more exciting research projects were in the pipeline. 

Che’s Peruvian wife, Hilda, now working for the United Nations, joined him in Mexico. Hilda was pregnant and Che wrote to his aunt:

‘Life goes on with bourgeois sloth, without anything to cloud my daily work, not even the proximity of the baby, which will apparently arrive between the last week of February and first week of March.’

What little cause for concern the family might have had was removed when Che announced in one of the letters that there was a very good chance that he would become a professor of physiology at the National University Mexico.

In April 1956, Che informed his parents in a letter that his baby girl was born and in good health. The professorship in Physiology, however, had not materialised, because Che had ‘realised’ that Physiology was not his ‘forte’. He ended this letter with:

‘A big hug for everyone . . . from this misunderstood champion of freedom.’

The above letter, sent from Mexico in April 1956, arrived in Argentina in July 1956. The same month the international telegraph, as Guvera-Lynch recalls in the memoir, ‘went mad’: Fidel Castro had been taken prisoner with a group of Cuban revolutionaries and some foreign ones, amongst whom was Dr Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.

The news went through the family like a wildfire. Guevara-Lynch, going mad with worry, tried every means to find out what was going on with his son in Mexico. Che Guevara was, by this time, in jail in the city of Mexico.  It began to dawn on the family that all the news Che had fed them in his earlier letters about possible professorships and assignments was simply a smoke-screen to deceive the family as well as the Mexican and American Information Service, which, at that time, were on the lookout for any clues that would enable them to frustrate the invasion of Cuba.

Guvera-Lynch wrote a letter to his son, incarcerated in the municipal prison, Mexico, asking him to explain ‘without beating about the bush’ his [Che Guevara’s] position within the 26 July Movement that until then, he [Guevara-Lynch] ‘was not aware of’.

He received a reply the same month. In the letter, transcribed in the memoir in its entirety, Che Guevara gave a full account of his association with ‘a young Cuban leader’. He informed his parents that he had decided to join Castro’s movement for the armed liberation of his [Castro’s] land. He accepted (but did not apologize) that for the previous few months he had been keeping up the lie to the family about his professional activities. He had never had any scholarship; he was not involved in any research; he was busy in physical training of the ‘boys’ who ‘must one day set foot in Cuba’. He informed his father categorically that his future was linked to the Cuban revolution. ‘Either I succeed with it or I die there.’

In the memoir, this is how Guevara-Lynch records his reaction when he received his son’s letter.

‘.  . . letter fell like a bomb on our family. Our hopes that Ernesto would one day become a scientist, following his medical career, melted like snow in the sun. . . Now the truth was out in the open. We could no longer harbour any doubts. He [Che] had just exchanged all his studies and medical career . . .for something much more dangerous, in which he had placed all his faith: armed struggle against the American Imperialists who were exploiting the underdeveloped peoples of Latin America.’

The memoir ends with another long letter Che wrote to his mother in October 1956, when he was out of jail. He begins the letter by calling himself his mother’s ‘filthy son’ with ‘profession of a grasshopper—here today, there tomorrow etc.’ He ends the letter thus:

‘Now all that is left is the final part of the speech with reference to the little man himself [Che Guevara] and which could be titled: ‘And now what?’ Now comes the difficult thing that which I have never avoided and which I have always liked. The sky has not turned black, the constellations have not been affected, nor have there been any nasty floods or hurricanes. The signs are good. They augur victory. But if they were mistaken, since even the gods make mistakes, I believe that I will be able to say like the poet you do not know, “I will only take with me to the grave the sorrow of an unfinished song.”

I kiss you again with all the affection of a parting that refuses to be the final one.’

The Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara is one of the most moving and affecting character portrait I have read in many years. Che Guevara who emerges out of the memoir, assembled by his father from several letters Che wrote to his family (several years after his death), is a vivacious and cheerful young man, full of joy for life; an idealistic man who felt an overriding empathy for the oppressed and the downtrodden; a man who was prepared to jettison comforts of his comfortable family background; a man who had a great sense of humour and derived enjoyment from small things in life; and a man, above all, who, no matter which corner of the world he was in, remained close to his family.

The memoir is as much about Che Guevara’s family as him; and the father Ernesto Guevara-Lynch, emerges out of it with shining colours, not least because of the honesty with which he records his emotions, as his son leads—as he himself puts it in his last letter—the life of a grasshopper. The family’s anxieties, the concerns, and the uncertainties—all linked to the path down which Che Guevara was going—and the frustration that this intelligent, highly qualified young man was wasting his talents (as the parents saw it at the time) are all recorded with endearing honesty.

The Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara is also a very scholarly book. Through Che Guevara’s letters to his family and his parents’ to him, the reader is provided with more than a glimpse of the socio-political history of the South Americas (albeit with a strong ideological left-wing bias).

An excellent read. A book to be savoured again and again.