Title: All about H. Hatterr
First published: 1970
Description: Wildly funny and wonderfully bizarre, "All About H. Hatterr" is one of the most perfectly eccentric and strangely absorbing works modern English has produced. H. Hatterr is the son of a European merchant officer and a lady from Penang who has been raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. His story is of his search for enlightenment as, in the course of visiting seven Oriental cities, he consults with seven sages, each of whom specializes in a different aspect of "Living." Each teacher delivers himself of a great "Generality," each great Generality launches a new great "Adventure," from each of which Hatter escapes not so much greatly edified as by the skin of his teeth. The book is a comic extravaganza, but as Anthony Burgess writes in his introduction, "it is the language that makes the book. ... It is not pure English; it is like Shakespeare, Joyce, and Kipling, gloriously impure."
Subjects: Fiction, general, Biographical fiction
LC classification: PR6007 E6427 A5 1970