Talking Points
G. V. Desani eagerly looked forward to critic's reviews and commentary ... and no wonder:
- ... (All About H. Hatterr) is revolutionary in English literature. -- Benjamin Slade
- ... taking two very important novels, James Joyce's Ulysses and G. V. Desani's All about H. Hatterr ... -- Srinivas Aravamudan
- ... the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language.
-- Salman Rushdie
Here, then, are some recent talking points for Desani, as garnered from the Internet. (The most recent are typically listed first.)
From Very Short List, a web site: "It’s not often that you have the opportunity to pick up a book and within moments realize you’re reading something entirely and interestingly unlike anything you’ve ever read before. But such is the case with (Desani's Hatterr), a thoroughly weird (in the best way) and hilarious novel."
Commentary by Fips under the title The Indian Finnegans Wake. "Desani’s novel therefore offers a staunch alternative to the English literary tradition that had progressed through Kipling (who indeed gets a mention) to Forster in the shadow of the Great War, no better illustrated by the eloquent portrayal of the absurdities of English society and culture in English from a foreign voice.2 The language of the oppressor then, can not only be appropriated but can be employed so eloquently and so satirically to the detriment of the former."
In the "Akhond of Swat Stuff. And nonsense blog," Nilanjana relates Jerry Pinto's list of the top 25 Indian authors. She writes, "Some books belong to the category of works you should re-read every decade, to see what has aged faster, the books or yourself: Midnight’s Children, (All About) H Hatterr, The Shadow Lines." (Originally published in the Business Standard, March 8, 2005.)
Srinivas Aravamudan, writing for Princeton University Press under the topic "Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language", considered the relationship between Desani, Rushdie, and James Joyce.
... The third chapter focuses on Theosophy and its critique, taking two very important novels, James Joyce's Ulysses and G. V. Desani's All about H. Hatterr, as the vehicle for this investigation. This chapter shows how modernism helps these writers derive an ethics of destabilizing and satirical laughter when confronted with the creative obscurantism of religious innovators such as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. However, rather than document Joyce's "influence" on Desani, or conversely, attack those who thereby produce assessments of Desani's diminished creativity, this chapter focuses on the transcultural dynamics of both Joyce's and Desani's attitudes toward Eastern religions. The use of Hinduism and Buddhism (especially through a Theosophical lens in Joyce's case) makes for other narratives of cultural filiation. Desani's relationship to Joyce is one of creative affiliation, as is Salman Rushdie's, and affiliations such as these -- which are voluntary and cross-cultural -- can best be understood within the postcolonial frameworks of Guru English.
David A. James writing for (or re-printed in) The Ester Republic, the National Rag of the People's Republic of Independent Ester (Ester, Alaska) reviewed Rushdie's and West's anthology (Mirrorwork) and Kiran Desai's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard under the title "Tales from India and Tales from the Working Poor".
Rehan Ansari (Modest Productions) created an adaptation of All About H. Hatterr entitled "DAMME, THIS IS THE ORIENTAL SCENE FOR YOU!" which ran for several weeks in Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace. Reported in the on-line publication NOW's theater section. Oddly, this is also the title of Rushdie's introductory piece in The New Yorker's 1997 retrospective on Indian fiction. (Editor's note: Previous adaptations of Hatterr were produced in London's Ridiculusmus Theatre in 1996 and 1997.)
Nilanjana S. Roy, writing in the on-line publication Rediff, post-humously invited G.V. Desani to her home in a piece entitled, "A Fictional Dinner Party" (May, 2005).
An anonymous reviewer for DW Deutch Welle commenting on an article entitled "Between Bombay and Berlin", presumably in a previous issue of the same publication) provides in "What Is Indian Literature" a perspective from a non-native English speaking audience (September 26, 2006).
The uncredited author or authors of the article “Between Bombay and Berlin” (Sept. 24, 2006) has/have chosen his/her/their title with care: it seems to indicate the ‘range’ of the ‘Indian’ literature at the disposal of the diligent German critic. The parameters are set right at the beginning:
Anybody looking at the Indian literary landscape will manage to get an overview only with difficulty. Despite all efforts by advocates and translators, the German reader can gather a more profound impression of the Subcontinent’s literature only in English.
The author excuses the German reader by commenting that the Indian intellectual is not much farther down that road either, there being hardly any translations from one Indian language into another.
The National Book Trust finds an honourable, if meagre mention in the context.
The article very clearly deals with Indian authors and poets who are available, or are being made available in German. And the author’s preference is very clearly for the denser variety of Indian literature, represented by as diverse a bunch as the mid-20th century Urdu short stories of the hapless Saadat Hasan Manto, the “linguistic alchemy” and “mantras of hybridity” of G.V. Desani, or Kiran Nagarkar’s monomanic “God’s Little Soldier”.
Desani brings the author to his pet hate: the new breed of Indian authors writing in English, from Salman Rushdie over Shashi Tharoor, Vikas Swarup and Kiran DesaI to Jhumpa Lahiri – all translated into German, and promptlier than prompt in recent times. The objection is to their “stylistic chutneyfication”, their “bland ‘container’ language”, their “alienation from India’s reality”, their “brand making of globalized Indian literature”. Especially Vikas Swarup, with his extremely successful “Q & A”, comes in for some acerbic criticism, “Rupien Rupien” (in German) being declared as having “the literary worth of a Nintendo game”.
Poets such as Ranjit Hoskote (writing in English) or Rajvinder Singh (living in Berlin and writing in German) find much more sympathy.
Prasad Bidaye (Dept. of English and Centre for South Asian Studies) and Lipi Biswas Sen (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese) sponsored a University of Toronto symposium entitled "Midnight's Grandparent's: First-Wave South Asian Literature in English, A Century Later." (March, 2005). Professor Bidaye's topic was Humiliated Heroes in All About H.Hatterr and Midnight’s Children."
An English course at Berkeley taught by Priya Joshi and entitled "The Other Modernisms" focuses on several writers including G.V. Desani and Salman Rushdie.
C.J.S. Wallia, writing for the IndiaStar Review of Books, considered The New Yorker's 1997 special fiction issue (Indian focus).
Salman Rushdie's recent novel Midnight's Children has been widely acclaimed for its experimental style, often considered sui generis -- in a class of its own and generating itself. That it is ... another imitative work is overlooked. Uma Parameswaran notes that Rushdie sees himself more in the tradition of writers from the empire that struck back, rather than in the tradition of Anand, Narayan or Rao. Among the Indian writers, is G.V. Desani who is Rushdie's avowed master for he 'showed how English could be bent and kneaded until it spoke in an authentically Indian voice.
Feroza Jussawalla's and Uma Parameswaran's
early assessments of the extent of Desani's influence on Rushdie
were right on the mark. In this essay, Rushdie now grudgingly
concedes that he "learned a trick or two from him."
Indoanglian Literature web site: The Oxford Companion to English Literature calls (Hatterr) an "eccentric and inventive novel", having inspired even Rushdie and I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama.
Gita Mehta, author, as interviewed by C.J.S. Wallia for IndiaStar Review of Books:
C.J.W: On a different subject, in Snakes and Ladders you are full of praise for G.V. Desani's All About Mr. (sic) H. Hatterr. Desani, as you wrote in the book, drew high acclaim from the likes of T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, and E.M. Forster, no less. You call him a "modern wise man." I, too, like his writing very much deeply metaphysical and so wittty. The only other writer I know who writes such ambitious metaphysical fiction is Raja Rao, you know, his Chessmaster and His Moves, but he's not witty like Desani. What's your opinion of Desani's more recent book, Hali and Collected Stories?
Gita Mehta: Recent book by Desani?!
C.J.W.: McPherson, a small New York publishing house sent me a review copy. Delightfully clever, metaphysical stories.
Gita Mehta: I'll get a copy when I return to New York.
And Ms. Mehta, writing of Desani in her book Snakes and Ladders: It is a brilliant feat of intellect, and to achieve it he has invented an Indian English of such energy ...
Katherine Powers, writer for The Boston Globe, contributing to "Simplicius_Simplicissimus" and reviewing His Monkey Wife or Married to a Chimp: The novel (His Monkey Wife) is one of the great idiosyncratic comedies in English a designation, incidentally, that is a literary category in my mind. To it belong other such noble curiosities as Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds, G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatter, J.R. Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday, L. Rust Hill's How to Retire at Forty-one, and well, we'll leave the full list for another day [DAMN!!! Ed.]. Suffice it to say that what distinguishes the books in this category is not only that each is so idiosyncratic as to be sui generis, but also that the fulcrum of their comedy is cultural piety and the Western literary tradition. (It may be, alas, that in this day of enlightenment, the works can be enjoyed only by readers of "a certain age.")
"Storyteller", writing for Chowk, "Our Mother": presently, Mohsin Hamid, Arundathi Roy and others are one trick ponies only ... (now turn around and accuse me by saying, "so was Desani") which is true his other writings for us magazines and the Illustrated Weekly of India have been lost but Desani was a unique writer in that he was a trail blazer .
John Buchman, writing for his Web site, "Salman Rushdie Complete Book Review": All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani is a wonderful book. Even more outrageous than Rushdie in his use of language, this reminded me of a cross between Rushdie-gone-insane and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi! (it shares a great deal of the sublimely ridiculous, continuous farce of Ubu Roi). Of course, this book greatly pre-dates Rushdie, and Rushdie acknowledges Desani's influence on him in his introduction to Mirrorwork. I include it in this list of Rushdie books simply because I believe that admirers of Rushdie's books will enjoy Desani as well. Sadly, this book is long out of print.... (Editor's note: Also sadly, the site is down as of 12/26/05.)
Amardeep Singh, writing for his web site, "Book Coolie, Hobson-Jobson, and Daljit Nagra": It's kind of odd that the Indian book blog world is so densely populated with "Babus," "Sepoys," and "Coolies"! I am seriously considering starting an anonymous blog with a similar title to keep up with the exploding Hobson-Jobson blog scene. Maybe "The Madd Hatterr"? (a reference to the late, great G.V. Desani).
Also, Prof. Singh in his 2005 essay Re-Introducing All About H. Hatterr: "It's odd (on second reading), because I'm not finding Desani's book even remotely as obscure not. It's pretty smooth going, and really quite funny." ... "The mad English of All About H. Hatterr is a thoroughly self-conscious and finely controlled performance...." ... "It seems appropriate to read Hatterr as a species of modernist experimentation." ... "Not only is this book out of print, it's been widely overlooked by scholars of Anglo-Indian literature as well as 20th century literature more broadly." ... " .... my dream would be a new, fully annotated edition of the text."
Kanya, commenting on Prof. Singh's essay, "I think you are right on the money about the archetypal value of All about H. Hatterr. Probably the earliest satire on Anglo-Indian life and "Qui hai" culture. Desani is so hard to classify precisely because no one after him (till Alan Sealy's *The Trotter-nama*) seems to have written a satire of this class of people. Anglo-Indians were routinely satirized by the British (Jos Sedley and the nabob phenomena), but I don't know of any Indians trying to write mock-epics about the sahibs or the sahibs. The Eurasians were always low-life, abject or silenced. Kipling's *Kim* is, of course, masquerading as one."Benjamin Slade (alias: beoram) writing for the site dooyoo, "All About Who?, or, S. Rushdie's Secret Guru" (Editor's note: the article includes numerous quotations from Hatterr).
All About H. Hatterr by the Indian author G.V. Desani is a novel whose popularity is a bit like the rain in some parts of India either theres not a drop to be seen or theres a monsoon. When the book first appeared in 1948, it was greeted with a flood of critical acclaim and rare enthusiasm by many distinguished literary critics, including the poet T.S. Eliot. A few years later it sank into obscurity, dismissed by the previously enthusiastic West as "just a little savoury from the colonies" going out of print in 1951 only to emerge in the seventies as a "modern classic", with a laudatory introduction by English author Anthony Burgess (author of The Clockwork Orange and many other novels, as well as a scholar of James Joyce), who called it "a capacious hold-all of a book".
It then again vanished (and went out of print) for another decade, mouldering in crates, until Salman Rushdie after receiving the Booker Prize for Midnights Children in 1981 acknowledged Desani as his literary predecessor and brought All About H. Hatterr back into the spotlight. Sometime in the mid-eighties it predictably submerged once again and is presently out of print (even in India).
...
So, if you've any interest in modern Indian literature, or enjoy the works of Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Anthony Burgess or Salman Rushdie, I highly recommend All About H. Hatterr. Like Ulysses, its not an easy read (but by no means is it as difficult as Ulysses), but its a highly-rewarding book which though regrettably largely unknown is revolutionary in English literature.
...
Actually read somewhere that Desani's first falling-off of popularity was in part due to Naipaul. Desani was the "oriental gem" in the West until the rather Anglophilic Naipaul won over its affections (also due in part, it is claimed, to his scathing non-fiction books on India [which I haven't read yet] which made some people in the West feel 'vindicated' [of colonialism?]). I still like Naipaul a lot though too myself. B.
Tabish Khair, writing for The Hindu, "Across Divisions": Following Desani, Rushdie often uses compound words in which a native calque is combined with an English word. Words like "dia-lamp", for example, in The Moor's Last Sigh. At first blush, such words appear to be the same as Indian English neologisms in actual use; neologisms like the "lathi-charge" that appears in most English language papers. But they are not. Actual Indian English compounds combine a native calque with an English word to signify a third referent (with specifically Indian characteristics). Rushdie's (and Desani's) compound words merely stage this effect. Very often, as in "dia-lamp" or "khansamah-cook", the native calque is rendered superfluous. A dia is an earthern lamp; a khansamah is a cook.
Namita Gokhale, writing for The Hindu, "A Thousand Years of the Novel": India and the Indian subcontinent are witnessing a similar flowering of fictional realities. G.V. Desani's All about H. Hatterr was a cult novel which, more than 50 years ago, first articulated the dual consciousness and divided sensibility of the Anglo-Indian mind. Salman Rushdie has acknowledged his fictional debt to Desani's elusive yet prophetic style. Midnight's Children is the testimonial of an entire generation of post-independence voices, where Indians have appropriated the English language and made it their own. Just as Urdu evolved from an intermarriage of the Persian and Hindu tongues, so Hinglish is now a valid version of the Queen's English. (3/4/2001)
Rob Millman, writing for The Kathmandu Post Review of Books, "Through the Looking Glass of Indian Fiction" (11/29/1998).
Initially, neither Nehru's speech, Sahgal's With Pride and Prejudice or G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr conform to a style that rests easily with the reader. The first is crafted for history. The second bears witness to the death of Gandhi through the youthful eyes and emotions of a member of the ruling political dynasty. And the third is a kaleidoscope of language, imagery, events, people and places, which at first appears to mystify a little, and amuse at best....
The excerpt by Desani begins elliptically: "The name is H. Hatterr, and I am continuing. Biologically, I am fifty-fifty of the species." But go through the looking glass. Piece together the life and language of a dispossessed Anglo-Indian. Allow the writing to coalesce. What emerges is a character with a passionate desire to do more than just survive the epochal changes that have destroyed the ease and comfort of his pre-ordained way of life. Discover his anger, his humor and his compassion, and you have begun to unravel the riches that lie ahead....
Itala vivan, writing for the online Italian zine El Ghibli rivista online di letter atura della migrazione: l'impatto dell'ibridazione post-coloniale sulla britannicità della letteratura britannica. Italian.
Nilanjana S Roy, writing for The Indian Express: "The Literary Death Threat": Theres a wall-to-wall bookcase in my house that is given over to works of fiction by Indian writers. In that bookcase, I see a reflection of the publishing landscape over the last decade. Some of those books acquired classic status slowly, some were acclaimed at birth; some were pronounced dead-on-arrival; some, like G.V. Desanis All About H Hatterr, are indestructible even if they spend long years in hibernation until a new generation clamours to be introduced to the book all over again. (5/28/2005)
Vinay Lal. Manas, review article: Good Nazis and Just Scholars: Much Ado About the British Empire: Many writers around the world have embraced English as their very own tongue, but it is rightly noted that they have given English a new life. Judging from the list of recipients of the Booker Prize over the last two decades, the main shapers of the English novel are no longer English or even British; and as Porter recognizes, some writers, who have never received the Booker, and whose career indeed started before the Booker was even instituted, have done at least as much to enrich English. Porter is, however, clearly unaware of G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, of which T.S. Eliot, upon its publication in 1948, was to say: "In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it." This is no insignificant matter, for forty years before Salman Rushdie came along, Desani had already given shape to the post-modern novel.
Namita Gokhale, writing in The Hindu: A Thousand Years of the Novel: G.V. Desani's All about H. Hatterr was a cult novel which, more than 50 years ago, first articulated the dual consciousness and divided sensibility of the Anglo-Indian mind. Salman Rushdie has acknowledged his fictional debt to Desani's elusive yet prophetic style. Midnight's Children is the testimonial of an entire generation of post-independence voices, where Indians have appropriated the English language and made it their own. Just as Urdu evolved from an intermarriage of the Persian and Hindu tongues, so Hinglish is now a valid version of the Queen's English (March 4, 2001).
Chelva Kanaganayakam, Writing in English: Counterrealism as Alternative Literary History: In order to arrive at a possible theoretical approach to counterrealistic Indo-Anglian writing, one needs to acknowledge that experimental works did in fact borrow liberally from Western models. Even a work such as G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr (1948), a work which was ahead of its time, by both Indian and Western standards, owed much to the picaresque mode which was used to create a work whose characteristics today would be seen as anticipating post-modern novels. (Published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 69, Number 3, Summer, 2000.)
In 2002 Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002 was published. A chapter on Desani and Hatterr includes, "As she (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) puts it, Hatterr is 'a virtuoso novel where "English" attempts to claim its status as one of the Indian languages ... through the technique of sustained literal translation of the vernacular rather than islands of direct monstrous speech in a sea of authorial Standard English." Desani's language, instead of creating the illusion that it is the "natural" idiom of the characters, thrives on its artificiality."
Deccan Herald, "Food for Thought":
Balu Mohan: But then what happened to a writer like G.V. Desani, whose All About H. Hatterr is one of the better books that came out in Indian English?
Amitav Ghosh: G.V. Desani essentially silenced himself. After he wrote All About H. Hatterr he never wrote again. That was not anybody elses doing. He had a very popular response. Having said that we havent seen the last of G.V. Desani as yet. His journals are now going to be published and when that happens I think its going to be a very important event. (Aug. 17, 2003)
Assorted blogs and other discussion group comments:
Rhys, www.nightshadebooks.com: But in the manner of a grand hypocrite, there's a novel I'd like to recommend to you. If you haven't already read it, I urge you to seek it out. All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani. It has the most uplifting and infectious prose style I've ever come across. It's almost a sort of Indian ULYSSES seven chapters in which the narrator encounters each of the seven sages of India with bizarre and hilarious consequences. It reads like subcontinental jazz, lots of inspired improvising within precise and strongly thematic parameters. It's an awesome book. Desani (sic) is as great a writer as Vian, Mutis, or Pavic.
Assorted Amazon Reviewers of various editions of All About H. Hatterr.
***** 10 Stars. Sandeeparekh: Easily the best Indian novel written. And I think Midnight's Children is outstanding. But Hatterr is way ahead of everything else in style. (July 18, 2003)
***** STOP! Sashint: Stop whatever you are doing, whatever you are reading and whatever you are watching and make time for this book. Once you read Hatterr your literary life will be easily divided into two parts: Pre-Hatterr and Post-Hatterr. (Sept. 23, 2002)
**** Ooooohhh so cooool! A reader from Bombay: Salman Rushdie, in his collection of essays "Imaginary Homelands", acknowledges a longstanding debt to G.V. Desani. He paraphrases Desani's H. Hatterr talking about the migration of the fifties and the sixties. "We are. We are here," he says, speaking for Indian writers in England. Rushdie's own prose owes much to Desani, and Saleem Sinai to Hatterr. Desani's prose is rollicking, hilarious, wildly creative and even boisterous, in this book that was written in wartime and published in postwar England, over a decade after R.K. Narayan's gentle little Swami and Friends. Allan Sealy and, of course, Salman Rushdie are probably the best-known inheritors of the Desani mantle, having learned many tricks of their trade from him. But Desani himself has been sadly underrated for all these years, and, with the book not readily available, one has to hunt for his book in the King's Circle and Churchgate used-book markets of Bombay. Never fear, I discovered my copy there, and so might you. And in doing so, you might, as I did, discover Desani too. (April 26, 2004)
**** ... and I am continuing. Matt Herrick: This is a book whose content and literary importance are nearly inseperable. "The first great stroke of the decolonizing pen," Salman Rushdie (merely one in the great line of authors that Desani made available to themselves and the world) rightly called it. The book's language is its most interesting characteristic: "Hinglish" it has come to be called, proper English Hinduized and thereby made its authors own. The plot itself, while intriguing and playful, does not carry the reader along or provide enough substance to make this book great; the wonderful twists and turns of language and plot that we've come to associate with Indian literature in English is seen here only in germ form. Still, to miss this is to miss a revolution. Its out of print, but hopefully that will change; check the libraries in the meantime, and start a petition for a reprinting or something. (July 11, 2000)
Reajeev Srinivasan. In memoriam: Narayan, Greene, Desani, and Adams: A bit like Joyce, only with greater abandon and less gravitas. Hatterr is considered a gem, a classic.
Susanna Ghazvinizadeh in Ipercorsidigriselda. Un vero inglese dalla testa ai piedi, o quasi: L Altro ibrido nellInghilterra di Hanif Kureishi. (in Italian.)
venKat, Forum Hub All about Hatterr: Have anyone (sic) read G.V. Desani's All about H. Hatterr? One of the most challenging books I ever read. The language is mind boggling. The book gives you two choices. You love it or hate it, nothing in between. So sad, it's only one of the two books the author has ever written.
era.murugan, responding: "Venkat! What a wonderful book. Rushdie has acknowledged Desani's influence on him - u can observe traces of Desani in Midnight's Children. With just one book Desani has carved a place for himself in the Indo-Anglian literary world."
World Tibet Network News, "Talking points for The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes", by Jamyang Norbu: "Indeed since Salman Rushdie considered G.V. Desani's All About Hatterr to be the best English fiction written by an Indian, Norbu's Huree could be regarded by Rushdie as a close competitor ... unrivalled since Desani ... " (12/15/99).
Vithal C. Nadkarni, Yoga in the Age of Manipulation, Times of India (12/20/2002)
The phenomenon of the con and his or her chela, however, is scarcely new. Ancient texts are full of warnings against false masters and fake messiahs and the late writer G.V. Desani provided a classic portrait for modern times in his delightful book, All About H. Hatterr.
"'I have been the personal disciple of the illustrious graybeards, the Sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in India), Madras, Bombay, and the right Honourable the Sage of Delhi, the wholly Worshipful of Mogalsarai-Varanasi, and his naked Holiness Number One, the Sage of All India himself."
What shines through this Siddhartha-like odyssey is the tyranny of the so-called masters. Even in our supposedly liberated age led by a market mentality, this is similar to the authority wielded by advertisers and marketers who reinforce the 'I, me, mine' spirit of the times.
Lolita / Vladimir Nabokov discussion / Chowk chowkpicksbook:
Pankaj: Thanks for a very well written essay on Nabakov.
You might want to edit it and publish it on Chowk so that the other folks not visiting this section of Chowk may benefit from it :-). An in-depth knowledge of multiple languages entails the understanding of multiple cultures for the languages are but embedded inextricably into their parent cultures. This cultural fusion in a person could produce a distinctive style deviating from 'orthodox literature'; and isn't it what we love and cherish. BTW, I am wondering if you have read All About H.Hatterr by G.V. Desani. This book, written in 1948, is now counted amongst the modern classics in English. This book was forgotten and rediscovered two decades later and at once exalted to the status of a classic. Desani, according to Rushdie, was his guru who taught him how to write vernacular in English. His English is 'gloriously impure' like that of Shakespeare. G.V. Desani, invented an entirely 'original' English language in which his Indian characters could communicate. It has nuggets of sophisticated Hindu philosophy thrown in apparently very humorous background of 'life incidents'.
AlphaNull: Yes, I have read Desani's All about H. Hatterr a decade ago. I cannot for the life of me locate my own copy now :-(. I do remember in general terms a picaresque novel full of madcap adventures, written in an extraordinarily vigorous hybrid idiom. The time may be ripe for a reread....
In retrospect it is not at all surprising that the fusion of Russian, French, English cultures should reach its zenith in a Russian emigre writer rather than, say, an Englishman-Russian being regarded as the most 'provincial' of the languages for the time and English as the one with the most 'universal' pretensions. And similarly it is unsurprising that a Desani would far outstrip, say, a Kipling, from the other side of the divide, in vigour and originality of expression if not, alas, in output.
Dennis Waite. From the Unreal to the Real: Recommended Reading Fiction and Poetry: Michael Reidy, an Irish philosopher on the Advaitin E-group, recommends All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani. His comment is, "unclassifiable folly and sovereign remedy for head heaviness". The Amazon reviews imply that it could be a little hard-going. Part of one of the reviews notes: "Trying to summarise the story would be a gross unjustice to the book, which is superb in content but absolutely brilliant in form. The style, scathingly original, is at times slightly tough to grasp (reminds one of Ulysses and the good old Joyce). Not a very light read, but really enjoyable."
Salman Rushdie, in an article entitled India and World Literature, in "Frontline: India's National Magazine," Vol. 14, no. 16 (Aug. 9-22, 1997). The essay was described as a reprint of his introduction to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-1997, edited
by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, Vintage (London, 1997).
Narayan shows us, over and over again, the quarrel between traditional, static India on the one hand, and modernity and progress, on the other; represented, in many of his stories and novels, by a confrontation between a "wimp" and a "bully" The Painter of Signs and his aggressive beloved with her birth control campaign; The Vendor of Sweets and the emancipated American daughter-in-law with the absurd "novel writing machine"; the mild-mannered printer and the extrovert taxidermist in The Man-Eater of Malgudi. In his gentle, lightly funny art, he goes to the heart of the Indian condition, and beyond it, into the human condition itself.
The writer I have placed alongside Narayan, G.V. Desani, has fallen so far from favour that the extraordinary All About H. Hatterr is presently out of print everywhere, even in India. Milan Kundera once said that all modern literature descends from either Richardson's Clarissa or Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and if Narayan is India's Richardson then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. His central figure, "fifty-fifty of the species", the half-breed as unabashed anti-hero, leaps and capers behind many of the texts in this book. Hard to imagine I. Allan Sealy's Trotter-Nama without Desani. My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him."