''All About H. Hatterr'' (
1948
Events January
* January 1
** The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is inaugurated.
** The Constitution of New Jersey (later subject to amendment) goes into effect.
** The railways of Britain are nationalized, to form British ...
) is a
novel
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...
by
G. V. Desani
Govindas Vishnoodas Desani (1909–2000), known as G. V. Desani, was a British-Indian novelist, poet, and social commentator. He was born in Kenya, reared in India and came of age in Britain. Knowledgeable about ancient Eastern spiritual tradi ...
chronicling the adventures of an Anglo-Malay man in search of wisdom and enlightenment. "As far back as in 1951," Desani later wrote, "I said H. Hatterr was a portrait of a man, the common vulgar species, found everywhere, both in the East and in the West".
Literary significance and reception
Salman Rushdie comments:
The mad English of ''All About H. Hatterr'' is a thoroughly self-conscious and finely controlled performance, as
Anthony Burgess points out in its preface:
Comments Amardeep Singh, Assistant Professor of English at
Lehigh University on the novel's ''mad'' English:
The novel appeared in
''The Telegraph'''s 2014 list of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels.
Footnotes
External links
*In Praise of "Balderdash" ''(And other words for "nonsense")'' by Amardeep Singh, Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University - a blog
www.desani.org
1948 British novels
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