All About H. Hatterr (New York Review Books Classics)
“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. ButHatterris more readable by miles thanFinnegans 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 StatesmanA “linguistic groundbreaker” –The Guardian(UK)“G. V. Desani - whose brilliant 1940s shaggy-dog novelAll About H HatterrinspiredMidnight'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)