All About G.V. Desani
In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it.
— T. S. EliotI didn’t read many books while writing Augie. One I did read and love was All About H. Hatterr…. So, what about All About? I hate to be siding with T.S. Eliot… but what can you do?
— Saul Bellow, The New York Times
My friend and colleague Hua Hsu has an appreciative review of G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr which has been recently reissued by NYRB books. Go here to read an excerpt from the book.
From the dust-jacket:
Wildly funny and wonderfully bizarre, All About H. Hatterr is one of the most perfectly eccentric and strangely absorbing works modern English has produced. H. Hatterr is the son of a European merchant officer and a lady from Penang who has been raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. His story is of his search for enlightenment as, in the course of visiting seven Oriental cities, he consults with seven sages, each of whom specializes in a different aspect of “Living.” Each teacher delivers himself of a great “Generality,” each great Generality launches a new great “Adventure,” from each of which Hatter escapes not so much greatly edified as by the skin of his teeth. The book is a comic extravaganza, but as Anthony Burgess writes in his introduction, “it is the language that makes the book… It is not pure English; it is like Shakespeare, Joyce, and Kipling, gloriously impure.”
Amardeep Singh provides a note on G.V. Desani and some useful links.
Interesting that Saul Bellow mentions he was reading Desani’s novel when writing Augie March. Don’t they have the same verve, linguistic abandon, throbbing invention of language and picaresque adventure? Interesting to think that the novel many consider to have invented a new literary language and idiom for America could have been so influenced by the first truly great novel of the Indian diaspora.
Comment by Suzy — November 29, 2007 @ 10:20 pm