Readiscovery

What I've read and discovered

  • Jhumpa Lahiri and Unaccustomed Earth

    Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian Americans. But this is really literature of globalisation and the immigrant experience — at the opposite end of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Lahiri writes about highly qualified, professionally successful immigrants. But there is the aching loneliness of the outsider in a foreign land

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  • Naipaul and The Enigma of Arrival

    Reviewing Patrick French’s biography of Naipaul in the Times Literary Supplement, AN Wilson is absolutely right when he says: Naipaul is one of the best journalists; The Enigma of Arrival is a masterpiece. The Enigma bored me when I first read it many years ago, but now I realise how good it is. Just don’t

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  • Auden on Auden

    He wanted to be a mining engineer or a geologist. Then just a month after his 15th birthday, he was walking home from school with a  friend one day in March 1922 when the friend asked him if he wrote poetry. “No,” he said. “Why don’t you?” asked the friend. And that was when he

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  • Playwright with a punch

    What a man. Wilson wrote standing up, at a high, cluttered accounting desk. For years, an Everlast punching bag was suspended from the ceiling about two steps behind. When Wilson was in full flow and the dialogue was popping, he’d stop, pivot, throw a barrage of punches, then turn back to work. Pinned on a

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  • Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Goldfinger

    Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr No was perhaps the most famous of the early Bond girls. But did Ian Fleming name Honey Ryder after the beautiful blonde Muriel Wright, who was nicknamed Honeytop? Ben McIntyre, author of a new Fleming biography, does not say so in his article in The Times but says

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  • Rushdie wants to write another children’s book

    Salman Rushdie has the same literary agent as Martin Amis and Philip Roth. Andrew Wylie must be three times lucky to represent such a triumvirate. Or is he? I don’t know about Roth, but Rusdhie and Amis are two of the most controversial — and stylish– writers around. But Rushdie is better. I would say

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  • The sexy Mughals

    City of Djinns: A Year In Delhi by William DalrympleThe foppish, snobbish Indian Muslim nobility were no different from the French and English aristocrats. They were as cultured, sophisticated and sensual. Eighteenth century Indian Muslim aristocrats visiting each other exchanged poems like the Restoration wits — with one difference: the poems were not self-composed but

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  • Naipaul interviewed

    The Observer has an interview with Naipaul today. It begins with a delicious anecdote. When the head of the Swedish Academy called him at his home in England in October 2001 to tell him he had won the Nobel Prize, his wife picked up the phone and said he could not be disturbed: he was

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  • India and the Booker

    The Booker Prize (now the Man Booker) has been won by novels set in India six times in the 40-year history of the Commonwealth’s biggest literature prize. That’s excluding The Life of Pi, the 2002 winner by the Canadian writer Yann Martel, which I haven’t read but which is also partly set in India. I

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  • Copulative conjunctions and more

    Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies by June Casagrande This book is as entertaining as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In fact, it’s naughtier. June Casagrande not only devotes a chapter to “copulative conjuctions” (about which more later); she has another chapter titled “I’m Writing This While Naked”. There’s this scene as well: Male student: You

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