One of my favorite books is to be published in the U.S. eighteen years after it first came out in India. This book, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, is being brought out by NYRB in April.

“I’ve a feeling, August, you’re going to get hazaar fucked in Madna.” “‘Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American,’ Agastya laughed, ‘a thousand fucked, really fucked. I’m sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease.’” You read these lines on the very first page of the new novel by a twenty-six-year-old writer–and if you too were in your twenties, and had misspent many years in Delhi, and, like the protagonist, had had sex more often with yourself than with others, this language found you suddenly willing to conduct lightning.

When I heard that this delightful novel is going to come out in America I went back to those acerbic parts where Chatterjee mocked assumptions that any foreign visitor might have about small-town India. Remember the moment when a British visitor expresses surprise that there is a video parlor, possibly showing blue films, in a remote Indian town? This is what Agastya said to his guest: “‘About sixty-five per cent of the population of the block of Jompanna–a block is roughly one-sixth or one-seventh of a district–is illiterate. But one doesn’t need to be brainy or literate to watch a blue film on video. Your real surprise is just the…’ he looked for the word, ‘juxtaposition, isn’t it?’ and then he was galled by Avery’s solemnity (and so began, in Madan’s phrase, to ‘finger’ him), ‘but that’s because India is a land of sublime and fascinating contradictions, where the Himalayas of the soul arise out of dung, and dance hand in hand with the phallus of Shiv.’”

I hope the book garners good reviews here but I also know that Chatterjee probably doesn’t care. A part of the reason English, August is just so good is because its author hasn’t tried to cultivate an audience that doesn’t recognize his world immediately. That explains the book’s wonderful comedy and irreverence–its ability to mock itself and the world of its readers. Nevertheless, I hope they give Chatterjee a Pulitzer. No, wait! They are really provincial in places like New York. Even more so than Hollywood. You have to be an American, silly, to get this award! Even though it is true that much of America has been outsourced to places closer to Madna.