Category: Books
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Naipaul and his women
The World Is What It Is by Patrick French The book ends with Naipaul in tears leaning against a taxi cab after scattering the ashes of his wife, Pat, in a wood before returning to his home in Wiltshire. He sang the hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful, he told…
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Updike’s Terrorist and adulterers
The Terrorist by John Updike India, not Iran, was the first to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses shortly after it came out in September 1988, reminds the Observer. The then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government banned the book under pressure from the opposition Janata Party. Both wanted the…
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PD James’ leisurely murder mystery
The Private Patient by PD James This is an Adam Dalgliesh mystery where the Scotland Yard detective enters late into the story. And even then Commander Dalgliesh hardly occupies centrestage. The focus keeps shifting from one character to another. His subordinates, Kate Miskin and Francis Benton-Smith, duly get their turn…
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Writing on sex and death at 91
Diana Athill is 91 years old and won the 2008 Costa prize for biography for her memoir, Somewhere Towards The End, where she talks about her love affairs, her work as a book editor, and what it means to be growing old. She helped Andre Deutsch – who was briefly…
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Rumpole’s creator finally at rest
Is Rumpole as popular as Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster? That’s what some British newspapers are claiming today following the death of his 85-year-old creator, Sir John Mortimer. There’s a wee bit of exaggeration, I think, a Bertie Wooster fan with immense respect for Sherlock Holmes. I just went through…
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Naipaul’s seven rules for aspiring writers
VS Naipaul advised aspiring writers to practise what he had learnt from his father, says Patrick French in his biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. When the Indian website Tehelka asked Naipaul to suggest some rules for aspiring writers, this was the advice he gave: Do not…
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Any Prince To Any Princess by Adrian Henri
I have loved Adrian Henri ever since I read him in my schooldays in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the Penguin Modern Poets’ Mersey Sound. The slim red paperback with photo negatives of mop-headed young men on the cover, which included poems by him and two other Liverpool poets Brian Patten…
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Remembering Steinbeck
John Steinbeck died on this day in 1968 at the age of 66, six years after he won the Nobel Prize, which even he himself didn’t expect. Critical scorn When asked by a reporter whether he believed he deserved the prize, he responded, “Frankly, no,” says Robert Gottlieb. In a…
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