All About H. Hatterr (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: pundit folk, last sadhana, hundred chips, Sri Banerrji, Baw Saw, Bill Smythe (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it.” –T. S. Eliot

"Bless him, [Desani] does mash it up, bending orthography, stretching syntax, mixing in shards of Hindi, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German and a goodly dose of balderdash, whilst tossing in references to Whitman, Shakespeare, Socrates, Freud and appeals to Kama and Laxmi as well as to Allah and Christ. Only a quasi-outsider (an Irishman, say) could have such an irreverent ear for the Anglo-Saxon tongue. But Hatterr is more readable by miles than Finnegans Wake, and a lot more fun." -Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times

“A mischievous mulligatawny that reads like a collaboration between Mrs. Malaprop and Groucho Marx…At the end you may not quite know where you’ve been, but you understand you’ve had a helluva trip.” –Newsweek

“A bizarre and delightful voice…to paraphrase would be travesty.” –Time

"The instrument of subservience became a weapon of liberation. It was the first great stroke of the decolonizing pen." –Salman Rushdie

“Eclectic, nourishing, do-it-yourself subcontinental stew.” –Githa Hariharan

"Now…you can marvel at one of the great verbal extravaganzas in the English (more or less) language." –The Nation

"A rewarding feast of fish and fowl, fiction and philosophy, hilarity and hope." –The New York Times

“One doesn’t explain a work like this, or attempt to describe it. You simply let the language flow like the lyrics of a Calypso song, or a subdued show of stroboscopic lights.” –The San Francisco Chronicle

“Mr. Desani is a writer of great originality, who is making a contribution…all his own.” –C. P. Snow

"Desani is undoubtedly a master in the creative use of English–puns, parodies, colloquialisms–and an accomplished artist in the invention of a new language." –World Literature Today

"Challenging, stimulating, and thoroughly delightful." –Austin-American Statesman

A “linguistic groundbreaker” –The Guardian (UK)

“G. V. Desani - whose brilliant 1940s shaggy-dog novel All About H Hatterr inspired Midnight's Children - what enchants, is a 'rigmarole English', as Hatterr would say, all its own.” –The Guardian (UK)

“A comic masterpiece…This books is one of the funniest I have read for many years…Desani’s verbal invention is indefatigable, his linguistic sources inexhaustible.”–Philip Toynbee, The Observer (UK)

Product Description

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.”

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (November 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590172426
• ISBN-13: 978-1590172421
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #277,524 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars and I am continuing..., July 11, 2000

By	Matt Herrick (Brunswick, ME) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All About H. Hatterr: A Novel (Paperback)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular., August 26, 2000

By	Chandra M (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All About H. Hatterr (Paperback)

'All about H Hatterr' is an achievement non-pareil (and I'm not only considering Indian-born writers here). This novel captures the adventures of a certain H Hatterr, an Anglo-Indian never-do-good fellow, amongst the seven sages. He gets into all kinds of trouble, always to be bailed out by his devoted friend Bannerji and 'that gem of a lawyer', Y Beliram. 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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ooooohhh so cooool!, April 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: All About H. Hatterr (Paperback)

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.