After yesterday’s performance, I’m amazed that I went all day today without mentioning V. S. Naipaul. Let me remedy that immediately …

In Paul Theroux’s book Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Theroux describes meeting Naipaul in Kampala in the 1960s. Naipaul assures him that everything they see in East Africa is passing away: “All of it, back to bush.” He surprises Indian shopkeepers by asking what they plan to do when that happens; it’s clear by their reactions that none of them have considered the possibility.

I thought of this scene recently when I read about M. G. Vassanji’s novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lal, which won Canada’s Giller Prize last year and was published in the U.S. yesterday by Random House. It’s as if Vassanji picks up the scene precisely when Theroux leaves it, though the action takes place in Kenya rather than Uganda. The plot follows a member of the Indian community as Kenya descends into the corruption and chaos of the Kenyatta regime, and then later as he emigrates to Canada.

I’ve seen a few reviews – Washington Times and the Sunday Herald (Scotland) – but I expect we’ll see more. The August 26 review in the TLS (excerpt below) is the most positive: “an ambituous and enthralling work that takes in a broad sweep of Kenyan history.” Just a reminder: Vassanji will also be in Chicago on October 2 for a “books and brunch” session sponsored by the Canadian embassy. Reservations required, admission charge, but you get the book.

My favorite line in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies comes in Chapter Six. It’s the scene in which Minerva, the boldest of the Mirabal sisters, is dancing with the dictator Trujillo. As they dance, they have a conversation that is really a kind of duel. At one point Minerva inadvertently reveals her relationship with a young man arrested by the government, by blurting out his name. Alvarez’s description of how the dictator reacts reminded me of the few autocrats I’ve known — none, fortunately, in charge of a country — and their almost religious fixation on language. Miverva attempts to cover her tracks with additional words of explanation, but she sees that Trujillo is already in his own world:

El Jefe’s gaze is withdrawing further and further into some back room of his mind where he tortures meaning out of the words he hears.

Dan Green’s essay on the “merely literary” touches on a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. That topic can be summed up in two propositions:

1. I prefer literature that returns me to the world, rather than to literature.
2. I prefer criticism that returns me to literature, rather than to the world.

By “returns me,” I mean “makes me eager to look at with the new perspective or knowledge I’ve gained.” Proposition #1 doesn’t mean I prefer topical or didactic works. Nor does it mean that I prefer traditional over experimental works. In fact, experimental novels are often the most useful in breaking down the “habits of seeing” that hide the world from us. (If you don’t think the world is hidden from you, stop reading here.) Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, might send me back to Homer, but it sends me back to my city and my world first. Bloom isn’t of interest because he resembles Homer’s hero; Homer’s hero is of interest (vis-a-vis Joyce’s book) because he helps us understand Bloom. Reading Perec or Calvino, to cite two other examples, always makes me want to look out the window.

I also enjoy literature that sends me to literature, but that’s very much a secondary pleasure for me. I sometimes enjoy criticism that sends me to the world rather than to literature, but most of it, unfortunately, is tendentious and bad. (Ricks’s book on Keats is one exception that comes to mind.)

Oddly, what put me on this train of thought was Wieseltier’s piece on Milosz in Sunday’s NYTBR. With his review of Checkpoint, it was all world and no work. (The world was too much with us? No, you’re right — that’s over the top.) His piece on Milosz, however, was very different. This one led me back to literature, reminded me of some works I’d forgotten or needed to see again, and helped me appreciate and enjoy the poet once more. That’s what I look for in criticism.

(Ok, that’s my mock-essay for the day. See also Bast for a reaction to Dan’s piece.)

Speaking of Naipaul, the piece on the author in The Observer recently (via Saloon) seemed to suggest that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for Half a Life. Of course, the Nobel isn’t awarded for a single work, which you know if you remember the old Eliot anecdote:

While traveling to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in 1948, T. S. Eliot was interviewed by a reporter who asked the famed poet for which of his works he was being honored. Eliot replied that he believed it was for the entire corpus. “And when,” the journalist asked, “did you publish that?”

Interestingly (to me at least), the Nobel foundation has published a little essay on how the criteria for the literature prize has evolved as the Swedish Academy tries to interpret Nobel’s intentions as expressed in his will. The focus has shifted over the years in distinct phases, which they helpfully define for us:

“A Lofty and Sound Idealism” (1901-12)
A Policy of Neutrality (World War I)
“The Great Style” (the 1920s)
“Universal Interest” (the 1930s)
“The Pioneers” (1946- )
Attention to Unknown Masters (1978- )
“The Literature of the Whole World” (1986- )

I guess these have been implicit in their choices, but it was neat to see them spelled out.

I’ve just come across Sunil Khilnani’s review of V. S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds in the September 3 TLS (subsc only). It’s clear the book isn’t very good, but Khilnani does a nice job placing it in the context of Naipaul’s work. Half a Life was much the same: not successful (or even intermittently enjoyable) as a novel, but helpful in understanding the past work a little better.

It appears that the book incorporates the story “Suckers,” which appeared in the New Yorker earlier this year and which typifies the ugliness that’s overtaken Naipaul’s late work (and, some would say, his thinking). Ugly works can be great too, obviously; just not, so far, in Naipaul’s case.

From Khilnani’s closing paragraph:

Magic Seeds is an important enrichment of Naipaul’s oeuvre. But making sense of it is an uneasy business. It has been increasingly clear with his late fictions that we read them to hear the author’s voice, not those of his characters (how different it is to read A House for Mr. Biswas). This experience is undoubtedly powerful, but it yields a diminished sense of what the novel is for. Throughout the picturesque bleakness of Magic Seeds, we are shifted between Willie’s point of view — his is ostensibly the consciousness that holds the novel together — and that of an all-seeing narrator. In fact, Willie is interesting to us because of how Naipaul uses him: otherwise, he is a mental and moral wraith, a man of poses and petty wisdom pitiably won.

Today I received my tickets for Norman Sherry’s Chicago lecture on November 6. The big book — that is, the last volume in Sherry’s definitive three-volume biography of Graham Greene — comes out on October 7. So why haven’t we heard more about it? The only piece I’ve seen so far is Norman Lebrecht’s in The Scotsman. What I’m curious about is this: now that Sherry’s done, when do other researchers get access to the archive?

A good Chicago guy is gone. Gapers notes his passing, and Red Herring has a sensitive piece too.

In the letters column of the August 27 TLS, Kevin Maynard reminds us, with more politeness than we deserve, that new poet laureate Ted Kooser is hardly as little known as some suggest. He points out that Kooser’s poetry is highlighted in two works that, it seems to me, most people with even a moderate interest in poetry would probably have read. Those works are Czeslaw Milosz’s anthology A Book of Luminous Things, and Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter? (Note I said “read,” not “agreed with.”) I’ve read both — not carefully enough, obviously.

In honor of the beginning of football season, and in the true spirit of dispelling myth and misunderstanding, from Ring Lardner, First and Last (1934), “The Origin of Football”:

But there is nothing in Mr. Haughton’s book regarding the true origin of American football and where it comes from and etc. and it looks like a few words on the subject from the undersigned wouldn’t go amiss. So will say at the outset that our American game of football was borrowed from England is bunkarino and where we really got a hold of our game was from the far flung fields of Galicia.To be sure the English has got a game called Rugby, or Rounders, but it is a game which is generally played outdoors on a field faceing both ways. Rugby, or Rounders, is similar to a game played with the ft. in Brazil called Rigby, or Rinders, and something like the Dutch game called Roogby. The last named, however, is played with a walrus shaped ball and with 1000 men on a side …

Another game resembling the English Rugby, or Rounders, is called Ragby, or Randers, and is played by the Swedes on a crokinole board. In Ragby, however, the game is played by both sexes with a manager or referee acting as pastor or umpire and 4000 people on a side …

But the daddy of our American football is the Galician game, Ruggles.

Speaking of Bertie Wooster (as I was below — don’t worry about it), like everybody else I’ve been enjoying reading about Robert McCrum’s new bio of P. G. Wodehouse. But what I really enjoyed was the Orwell article to which the Guardian review kindly linked — until it was recently taken off-line. Copyright issue, no doubt. Anyway, here’s a quote from Wooster’s creator during his internment by the Nazis, as quoted by Orwell:

In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen I am not so sure. … The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week.