Tag: novels

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Culture

All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani

All About H. Hatterr is a novel I bought after seeing it recommended somewhere — the complete review, I think. It is a modernist novel written in 1948 in a colloquial Indian English laced with bits of slang, Shakespeare, legal jargon and so on. I’m not in a position to judge the relationship between the language of the book and the English of India, but Salman Rushdie is quoted on the back cover:

Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language…. This is the ‘babu English,’ the semi-literate, half-learned English of the bazaars, transmuted by erudition, highbrow monkeying around, and the impish magic of Desani’s unique phrasing and rhythm into an entirely new kind of literary voice.

It would be interesting to read the whole article which that comes from, but it’s hidden behind the New Yorker’s pay wall.

The book is narrated by the H. Hatterr of the title, the son of a European merchant seaman and a woman from Burma, raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. It’s anecdotal and episodic in structure; there isn’t, at least for me at first reading, any kind of overarching plot. Picaresque might be a good word for it.

It is somewhat ‘difficult’ — it’s not for people who like their prose plain. But googling around while writing this post I’ve seen it compared to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and it’s certainly not that difficult. The prose is sometimes elaborate and colourful but otherwise fairly conventional: it’s not all stream-of-consciousnessy or anything. And there’s not a great deal of vocabulary from Indian languages. There’s more English public-school slang than there is Hindi.

PRESUMPTION: ‘Kismet’, i.e., fate — if at all anything, and as potent as suspected for centuries — is a dam’ baffling thing!
It defies a feller’s rational: his entire conception as to his soma, pneuma, and psyche!
Why did a feller like me commit matrimony with a femme fatale like Mrs H. Hatterr (née Rialto), the waxed Kiss-curl?
A personal query, but I don’t mind answering…
If only I could!
All I know is that I wanted to raise a family: add to the world’s vital statistics and legitimate: have a niche in the community, for my own kid, to hand out the wager till the end. And since you can’t achieve this without a wife — the neighbours wouldn’t let you! the police wouldn’t let you! — I equipped myself with the blarney-phrases, convinced this female that she was real jam, had me led to the middle aisle and gave the ready ‘I do’ to the amenwallah her brother had hired for the occasion.
This I did, knowing, hell, that between us was all the temperamental difference in the world!
Till death us do part! this museum-piece and I! And that promise — what a stingo! — after a conflict dating back to the donkey’s Sundays!
The female — contrast? — was poles apart: though, between the cur Jenkins, me and the Duke Humphrey, it did seem once that she was going to win my regards for good, by delivering me an heir-presumptive — my own piccolo le fils — to survive me (and be added to the looney-bin). But despite days and days of biological observation and anticipation — the wasted reference to the obstetric table and pre-occupation with the signs of labour — it didn’t come off. (Backed the wrong filly, or, maybe, something the matter with me as create-or!)

You probably have a pretty good idea whether that’s the kind of thing you like. Personally I enjoyed it, stylistically; occasionally there would be a particularly dense paragraph or two and I would glaze over a bit, but more often it was lively and funny.

My only reservation really is the one I have about a lot of these less traditional novels: I think perhaps the whole is less than the sum of its parts. I think people often overstate the importance of plots, but they are at least one way of holding a book together. Still, I’m glad I read it.

» The picture, ‘a Sadhu‘, is © Chris de Rham and used under a CC by-nc-nd licence. Sadhus feature quite heavily in the book.

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Culture

Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

The Anil of Anil’s Ghost is a forensic anthropologist; she was born in Sri Lanka but having left to study and work, she is now returning after 15 years away to investigate allegations of political murders. Ondaatje was eleven when he left Sri Lanka, so Anil’s insider/outsider status is presumably a reflection of his own experience. His decision to write this book is perhaps his equivalent of Anil’s need to return to Sri Lanka.

Ondaatje is really a very good writer. His books seem to have a dream-like quality, not so much because of what happens but the way that it is presented to us. Part of it is the way that the focus shifts around, not just between the main characters but an assortment of others who are only loosely connected to the central plot; and shifting backwards and forwards in time as well.

Also, if you were someone who just read books for the plot you might feel that it had its priorities oddly skewed: an ‘important’ event will go past rather rapidly, and then the book will dwell lovingly on a scene which has no particular narrative importance, but is atmospheric or striking or thematically apt.* It’s a kind of structuring which would seem very natural in a long poem but is a bit less common in novels.

As much as I liked the book, it was somewhat depressing. Perhaps a novel about ethnic conflict and political atrocities should be depressing, but still. Obviously I knew there was a long-running conflict in Sri Lanka, and of course it has been in the news recently as the war (or that phase of the war) drew to a bloody end; but I was blissfully ignorant of any of the details, and for me, Sri Lanka was largely associated with cricket. And it’s much more pleasant to associate a country with flamboyant opening batsmen than with heads on spikes. The book doesn’t actually wallow in the atrocities as much as it could do — they are evoked sparingly rather than described at length — but they are quite disturbing enough without that kind of pornographic attention to detail.

I had already counted a different book by Ondaatje — In the Skin of a Lion — as my book from Sri Lanka for the Read The World challenge, but that book is all set in Canada, so it seemed appropriate to read a book with a bit more Sri Lanka in it.

* I would hate to have to justify that sentence with close reference to the text, but thankfully I’m a blogger not a scholar.

» The picture, ‘Old Buddha, Sri Lanka‘ is © Rahul Barraez D’Lucca and used under a CC attribution licence.

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Culture

Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

Broken Glass is a novel from the Congo (aka the Republic of the Congo aka Congo-Brazzaville; i.e. the smaller of the two Congos, not the one which used to be Zaire). It was translated from French by Helen Stevenson.

It takes the form of the notebook jottings of the customer at a bar called Credit Gone West. Perhaps rather than try to explain:

let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I – Broken Glass – can turn out a book, because one day, for a laugh, I told him about this famous writer who drank like a fish, and had to be picked up off the the street when he got drunk, which shows you should never joke with the boss, he takes everything literally, when he gave me this notebook he said from the start it was only for him, no one else would read it, and when I asked why he was so set on this notebook, he said he didn’t want Credit Gone West just to vanish one day, and added that people in this country have no sense of the importance of memory, that the days when grandmothers reminisced from their  deathbeds was gone now, this is the age of the written word, that’s all that’s left, the spoken word’s just black smoke, wild cat’s piss, the boss of Credit Gone West doesn’t like ready-made phrases like ‘in Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns‘, every time he hears that worn-out cliché he gets mad, he’ll say ‘depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down‘, so I thought I’d jot a few things down here from time to time, just to make him happy, though I’m not sure what I’m saying, I admit I’ve begun to quite enjoy it, I won’t tell him that, though, he’ll get ideas and start to push me to do more and more, and I want to be free to write when I want, when I can, there’s nothing worse than forced labour, I’m not his ghost, I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else, by the time he reads this, though, I’ll no longer be one of his customers, I’ll be dragging my bag of bones about some other place, just slip him the document quietly before I go saying ‘mission accomplished’

That’s the whole of the first chapter; the entire book is written without full stops in this way as long, run-on sentences. Generally it’s a pretty effective device, though at times it can be a bit tiring to read.

The first few chapters tell the stories of other customers at the bar, and then the second half of the book concentrates on Broken Glass’s own life, and how he went from being a school teacher to a drunkard. As the material becomes more personal the tone shifts from comic to melancholy, and the book ended up being more moving than I would have expected after the first couple of chapters.

I heard Mabanckou interviewed on the radio (or a podcast?) and one thing he said was that he didn’t particularly want to write about politics. Well, that’s fine by me. Over the course of reading books from every African country I can see that I’m likely to read an awful lot about civil war and dictatorship, both because that’s a real part of the African experience and because it is the kind of thing that is likely to attract Western publishers; so it’s good to read more personal narratives as well.

Broken Glass is my book from Congo for the Read The World challenge.

» the photo is 032_BIERE NGOK, uploaded to Flickr by & © jmlaurent.

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Culture

The Maias by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz

The Maias, by Eça de Queiroz/de Queirós, is a proper doorstop of a C19th novel, over 700 pages long. It’s late C19th, though, 1888. I was trying to think of apt comparisons, and none of them seemed exactly right, but it’s more like George Eliot or Tolstoy than Dickens. Or even early C20th novelists like Forster or Proust. Though the Proust comparison is not so much to do with style as subject matter: the romantic entanglements of wealthy, mildly bohemian society types.

One of the blurbs on the back compares him to Flaubert — ‘Eça de Queiroz rivals Flaubert in his suavely satiric pictures of provincial torpor and metropolitan glitter’ — which is another plausible choice.

eca_de_queiros_c-1_1882

Among the themes running through the book, the one I found most interesting was the question of Portugal’s place in the world, which is seen in terms of tradition vs. modernity but also Portugal’s cultural relationship with other European powers: there’s a real sense of a smallish country on the edge of Europe looking towards London and Paris with a hint of an inferiority complex. So the characters swing between claiming unique virtues for Portugal and admiring, for example, a dress that could only have come from Paris. Every discussion, of literature or an event or whatever, turns to comparisons with other countries; the yardstick for quality is an external one. It’s oddly like reading post-colonial fiction, even though Portugal was in fact colonist rather than colonised.

I think what I liked most about the book was the leisurely pace of it. Events at which nothing much happens — or at least nothing which is essential to advancing the plot —are allowed to spread over five or ten pages. There’s a 30-page description of them going to the races which is a big set piece within the book, full of social observation, incident and humour, but none of it is actually crucial to the plot. On another occasion, in another mood, I might have just been bored by it; but this time I enjoyed that expansiveness.

In Lisbon, from the Grémio to the Casa Havanesa, there was already talk of ‘Ega’s mistress’. He, for his part, was trying very hard to keep his happiness safe from prying eyes. While perfectly serious about the complicated precautions this entailed, he also took a romantic delight in mystery, and so always chose the most out-of-the-way places, n the outskirts of the city, in the area near the slaughterhouse, for his furtive meetings with the maid who brought him Raquel’s letters. But his every gesture (event he affected way he had of pretending not to look at the clock) revealed the enormous pride he felt in that elegant adultery. He was perfectly aware that his friends knew all about this glorious adventure of his, and were au fait with the whole drama, and this was perhaps why, when in the company of Carlos or the others, he never even mentioned her name or betrayed the slightest flicker of emotion.

One night, however, a night lit by a calm white moon, as he and Carlos were walking along together in silence on their way to Ramalhete, Ega, doubtless filled by a sudden inrush of passion, uttered a heartfelt sigh, reached out his arms and declared to the moon in a tremulous voice:

Oh, laisse-toi donc aimer, oh, l’amour c’est la vie!

This escaped his lips like the beginning of a confession. Carlos, at his side, said nothing, and simply blew his cigar smoke out into the air.

Ega clearly felt somewhat ridiculous, because he immediately recovered himself and pretended a mere literary interest.

‘They can say what they want, but there’s no one like old Hugo.’

Carlos still said nothing, but he recalled Ega’s Naturalist outbursts, in which he had inveighed against Victor Hugo, calling him a ‘spiritualist blabbermouth’, ‘an imitative yokel’, ‘a lyrical old fool’ and worse.

But that night, Ega, the great phrase-maker, went on:

‘Ah yes, old Hugo, the heroic champion of the eternal truths. We need a bit of idealism, damn it, because the ideal might one day become reality.’

And with this formal recantation he shattered the silence of the streets.

It’s good stuff. Another of the blurbs says ‘Eça ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century’, and without deciding at this moment exactly where I think he ought to come in the leaderboard for C19th novelists, I would say this: The Maias is undoubtedly a substantial, high quality and important novel, and at the very least deserves to be better known. I certainly hadn’t even heard of it before I noticed it in a bookshop.

A quick name-check for Margaret Jull Costa, who translated this edition, and has done a good job of it, as far as I can tell without knowing any Portuguese.

The Maias is my book from Portugal for the Read The World challenge. I realised after making up my original list that I had actually read a book from Portugal already: The Lusiads by Luís de Camões, which I read in a second hand copy of a 1950s Penguin Classic edition which I seem to have lost. But I was happy to read another.

» The photo, which comes from Wikipedia, is of Eça de Queiroz.

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Culture

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida

I’ll keep this fairly brief, because I’m going away to France for a week in Saturday and not only have I not packed, I haven’t done the more important bit of writing a list, and thus don’t know if I have to do some urgent shopping. Or laundry.

So: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo (translated from the Portuguese by Sheila Faria Glaser) is my book from Cape Verde for the Read The World challenge. For those who don’t know, Cape Verde is an island nation, an archipelago off the coast of Africa at about the point where the continent projects furthest into the Atlantic. It was uninhabited until the Portuguese started using it as a trading port, I learn from Wikipedia, and the population is largely of mixed European and African origin.

That history may explain why it feels more like a book from Latin America than from Africa. I would be hard-pressed to explain exactly what I mean by that: a sense that the European cultural influence is more deeply embedded is part of it, although I can’t immediately articulate what makes me say that. It may be no more than the fact that the book is full of names like Senhor da Silva Araújo, of course.

The book tells the story of a self-made local businessman; it starts with the reading of his will, which reveals unexpected news, and moves back and forward through his life, building up into complex portrait. It’s short — 151 pages — but nicely written, wryly humorous and open to the absurdities as well as the tragedies of the human condition.

» The picture, Ribeira Grande, Santo Antão, is © Cabo Verde 2008 and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.

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Culture

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

After really struggling with that Ugandan novel recently, I picked up Annie John to read next because it is admirably short: 148 pages. Just about enough to feel like a short novel rather than a long story, but I was still able to read it one sitting.

lizard

It is the story of Annie John, a girl growing up in Antigua, told in the first person. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the length, it is one of those books where not very much happens. There are a few incidents—an illness, some friendships—but nothing very remarkable. The focus is on Annie’s relationship with her mother, which starts out very close but becomes increasingly conflicted in adolescence, and ends in a somewhat open-ended way with her leaving home. Which obviously ends that chapter of her life but doesn’t provide any particularly tidy resolution.

Hedgie provides a fuller account of the book over at his place, so I’ll leave it at that and just say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, and quote a bit:

During my holidays from school, I was allowed to stay in bed long after my father had gone to work. He left our house every weekday at the stroke of seven by the Anglican church bell. I would lie in bed awake, and I could hear all the sounds my parents made as they prepared for the day ahead. As my mother made my father his breakfast, my father would shave, using his shaving brush that had an ivory handle and a razor that matched; then he would step outside to the little shed he had built for us as a bathroom, to quickly bathe in water that he had instructed my mother to leave outside overnight in the dew. That way, the water would be very cold, and he believed that cold water strengthened his back. If I had been a boy, I would have gotten the same treatment, but since I was a girl, and on top of that went to a school only with other girls, my mother would always add some hot water to my bathwater to take off the chill. On Sunday afternoons, while I was in Sunday school, my father took a hot bath; the tub was half filled with plain water, and then my mother would add a large cauldronful of water in which she had just boiled some bark and leaves from a bay-leaf tree. The bark and leaves were there for no reason other than that he liked the smell. He would spend hours lying in this bath, studying his pool coupons or drawing examples of pieces of furniture he planned to make. When i came home from Sunday  school, we would sit down to our Sunday dinner.

Annie John is my book from Antigua and Barbuda for the Read The World challenge, and my third book for the Caribbean Reading Challenge.

» The picture was taken on Antigua but has no other particular connection to the book. Nice though, I thought. I found it on Flickr; it is © Jeremy Quinn and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.