All About H. Hatterr
12) All About H. Hatterr by G. V. Desani
I cannot rave about this book enough. It's absolutely wonderful. It's in the Everyman novel tradition, but there is something unique about Hatterr even within this tradition.
H. Hatterr is half-European, half-Malay and 100% patsy. He grows up in India amidst a mishmash of conflicting ideologies- British colonial influences, Indian traditional influences, garbled influxes of modern philosophies- owning none of them but attempting to grab onto all of them. He always fails miserably and hilariously and pathetically... and gloriously.
Hatterr does not deserve better than he gets. Hatterr is every bit as crass and commercial as those who screw him out of money. Hatterr is every bit as undisciplined as those who best him in the sexual arena. Hatterr is every bit as hypocritical as those who keep him out of the spiritual world. He is one of those fools who need to be protected from themselves. That is the part of ourselves that we see in him, for he is in fact an Everyman.
Modernity is not a comfortable place. All he truly wants is comfort, and that is the one thing he cannot buy no matter how much Tradition he grabs. Hatterr occupies an inherently uncomfortable role, outsider on the edges of European civilization, inheritor of a different cultural strain, trying to figure out how to be true to his heritage without giving up the benefits of Western life.
Hatterr's appeals to the great Occidental wise men Marx and Freud and Locke are hysterical and at the same time tragic. The India we see in Desani's story is an India that will destroy itself and emerge no different from the West it fears and worships.
And Desani's prose!!!!!!! Crazy isn't enough of a word for it. Malapropisms refashioned into something more than malapropisms, the entire English language taken on a tour of the darker corners of its own history. Desani's Hatterr chews up Shakespeare and regurgitates his language into new patterns that retain the Bard's grace and add new levels of meaning and depth.
You ever read a book with language so energetic, so creative, so wildly and powerfully different from anything you've seen before that you just about dance in your seat from excitement as you read? This is that kind of book.
It is filled with powerful formal structures that explode in your hands as you try to read, sabotaging themselves, parodying themselves, refusing to be pinned down or understood in a consistent way. It's a book that is itself alive, and perhaps even human.
I cannot rave about this book enough. It's absolutely wonderful. It's in the Everyman novel tradition, but there is something unique about Hatterr even within this tradition.
H. Hatterr is half-European, half-Malay and 100% patsy. He grows up in India amidst a mishmash of conflicting ideologies- British colonial influences, Indian traditional influences, garbled influxes of modern philosophies- owning none of them but attempting to grab onto all of them. He always fails miserably and hilariously and pathetically... and gloriously.
Hatterr does not deserve better than he gets. Hatterr is every bit as crass and commercial as those who screw him out of money. Hatterr is every bit as undisciplined as those who best him in the sexual arena. Hatterr is every bit as hypocritical as those who keep him out of the spiritual world. He is one of those fools who need to be protected from themselves. That is the part of ourselves that we see in him, for he is in fact an Everyman.
Modernity is not a comfortable place. All he truly wants is comfort, and that is the one thing he cannot buy no matter how much Tradition he grabs. Hatterr occupies an inherently uncomfortable role, outsider on the edges of European civilization, inheritor of a different cultural strain, trying to figure out how to be true to his heritage without giving up the benefits of Western life.
Hatterr's appeals to the great Occidental wise men Marx and Freud and Locke are hysterical and at the same time tragic. The India we see in Desani's story is an India that will destroy itself and emerge no different from the West it fears and worships.
And Desani's prose!!!!!!! Crazy isn't enough of a word for it. Malapropisms refashioned into something more than malapropisms, the entire English language taken on a tour of the darker corners of its own history. Desani's Hatterr chews up Shakespeare and regurgitates his language into new patterns that retain the Bard's grace and add new levels of meaning and depth.
You ever read a book with language so energetic, so creative, so wildly and powerfully different from anything you've seen before that you just about dance in your seat from excitement as you read? This is that kind of book.
It is filled with powerful formal structures that explode in your hands as you try to read, sabotaging themselves, parodying themselves, refusing to be pinned down or understood in a consistent way. It's a book that is itself alive, and perhaps even human.