Scott Fitzgerald's Man In Hollywood

My Sunday Guardian column.

For better or for worse, it’s a golden time for “adapted screenplays”, with more and more novels being turned into scripts. In this year's Oscar nominations -- the results of which we'll know today -- five of the films nominated for such screenplays are also among those in the running for best picture.

One of those that missed being in contention this year is Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby, as the release date was pushed to May 2013. Unfortunately, given the trailer, and on the evidence of Moulin Rouge and Australia, it's not hard to imagine the film floating free of Fitzgerald to become another bloated Luhrmann fantasy. As Pat Hobby once said, “This is no art – this is an industry”.

The person who uttered those words was a character created by Fitzgerald, born out of the writer's disillusionment with Hollywood. He worked with the studios on three occasions, between 1927 and 1937, and though the experience wasn’t a happy one he did gain material for his final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, as well as for 17 short stories featuring the cynical scriptwriter Pat Hobby. All of the stories were first published in Esquire magazine, the last few appearing after his death in 1940.

Once seen as “a good man for structure”, Pat Hobby is now a 49-year-old hack unable to ride the transition from the silent era to the talkies. He spends his days drinking, scrounging and working on occasional “polish jobs”. When he isn't contemplating blackmail, he tries to steal others’ ideas (both unsuccessfully) and firmly believes that “what people you sat with at lunch was more important in getting along than what you dictated in your office”.

A typical story starts with Pat on the edge of solvency when, through his own desperate attempts or through the whims of others, he’s given a break which then comes to naught following an ironic twist. There are moments of broad farce, such as when Pat grumbles about and is then mistaken for Orson Welles; some others are flippant, such as when Pat encounters his son’s stepfather, Rajah Dak Raj Indore, “the third richest man in India”. The best of the stories, though, such as ‘Pat Hobby's Preview’, ‘No Harm Trying’ and ‘A Patriotic Short’ do reach a level of keen poignancy.

Fitzgerald aims for a wry, comic tone throughout but essentially, these are stories of failure, of refusing to admit that life hasn’t panned out the way one would have liked, when dreams of glory are supplanted by schemes to stay afloat. (This, of course, is akin to Fitzgerald’s own tragic situation at the time he was writing them.) When Pat is offered a writing job, “it anesthetised the crumbled, struggling remnants of his manhood, and inoculated him instead with a bland, easy-going confidence”. Such confidence is always short lived; recourse is to be found in gin, to conceal the look of “whipped misery” in his eyes.

For the author, this jaded character was “the scenario hack to whom I am getting rather attached” and it’s tempting to scan the stories for Fitzgerald’s own views on Hollywood. In one of them, we read: “Distress in Hollywood is endemic and often acute. Scarcely an executive but is being gnawed at by some insoluble problem and in a democratic way he will let you in on it, with no charge.” Elsewhere, Pat says, “Authors get a tough break out here. They never ought to come...They don’t want authors. They want writers – like me”.

Pat isn’t among Fitzgerald’s finest creations; most of the stories were written quickly for money when he was in straitened circumstances, even though he worked hard on them. But one can't help but agree with the words of Arnold Gingrich, former Esquire editor with whom Fitzgerald corresponded, that he deserves “his rightful place, if not alongside Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver, then at least between Monroe Stahr and Amory Blaine”.

English As She Is Spoke

My Sunday Guardian column.

Textspeak. The word “anyways”. The Twitter hashtag “epic”. Those are among my pet peeves. It turns out that in this, I’m being prescriptive when I should be descriptive. As Henry Hitchings says in his new book, The Language Wars, “a prescriptivist dictates how people should speak and write, whereas a descriptivist avoids passing judgement….So, one says what ought to happen, and the other says what does happen.”

Hitchings sets out to chart “the history of arguments over English”, the ways in which people have tried to control and modify it over the years. Defining himself squarely as a descriptivist, he points out that typically, celebrants and defenders of proper English are celebrating or defending something other than language. Status, snobbery, class, nationalism: all of these are at play. In Chomsky’s words, “Questions of language are basically questions of power” –take the demands for linguistic re-organisation of states in India, for instance.

The Language Wars also examines rules we’re supposed to adhere to, many of which have little to do with grammar and more with outmoded views on the status of English. The infinitive that Must Not Be Split, for example (which the opening voice-over of the Star Trek TV series boldly does); or not ending a sentence with a preposition. The origins of these turn out to be nothing more than a belief by classicists that English ought to mirror Latin. When Churchill was chided for ending a sentence with a preposition, he is supposed to have replied: “This is the sort of rubbish up with which I will not put”.Which would have warmed the heart of Raymond Chandler who, years later, wrote: “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split”.

Hitchings make clear that debates and hair-pulling over the drop in standards of English aren’t new; people have held views on the matter for centuries. Many have tried to straighten out affairs of pronunciation and spelling brought about by the language’s mixed roots. There was, for example, the alphabet devised by George Bernard Shaw after he pointed out that in current English, the word “fish” could well be spelled “ghoti”: gh pronounced like the f in enough, o like the i in women, and ti like the sh in nation. Never caught on, thank goodness.

Among the prescriptivists better known to us today are those such as Fowler and Strunk&White, who insist on simplicity and lack of ornamentation – something Orwell also spoke of in his essay, Politics and the English Language. Hitchings correctly points out that while there’s clearly nothing wrong with being simple and unadorned, equally, there are times one needs to express oneself in a manner that’s more complex. (Watch out for“government-endorsed sophistry and the flatulent rhetoric of politicians and political pundits”, though.)

Hitchings is, of course, against censorship and also defends the use of cuss words, should they be required, but I find him in choppier waters on issues such as those of gender or political correctness. I’m not entirely convinced that the descriptivist attitude is the right one here: perhaps the act of reframing also brings about a refashioning of attitudes, rewiring our brains to promote behaviour that’s more respectful.

The English language, then, is shifting constantly – in the vivid words of Emerson, it’s “a city to the building of which every human has brought a stone”. Robert McCrum writes in Globish that English is “floating free from its troubled British and American past…to take on a life of its own”; thus, some of the most significant changes in our time are occurring not in its birthplace but elsewhere. Hitchings points out that in India, “the language’s roots…are colonial, but English connects Indians less to the past than to the future”. In England itself one comes across “Jamaican Creole, certainly, but also Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Romani and various African Englishes”.One can almost hear editors of dictionaries let out a loud, collective groan.

Metaphors Be With You

Today's Sunday Guardian column

First, some random headlines from today’s papers: Slide in job generation. Smartphone war hots up. Pressure makes Davis Cup team go limp.

Metaphors. Keep an eye out and you’ll find them everywhere, including in this sentence. Leaving aside semantic differences between metaphors, analogies and similes, the practice of describing a thing by comparing it with another dominates not just our language but our outlook.

They are, of course, the lifeblood of poets (to employ an overused metaphor). From Carl Sandberg’s fog that comes on little cat feet to Emily Dickinson’s death-ridden carriage to Robert Frost’s road not taken, examples abound. Sylvia Plath even wrote a poem during her pregnancy titled ‘Metaphors’ in which every striking line was a metaphor. And Shakespeare’s metaphors have been quoted for ages: Juliet is a sun; the world’s a stage; a loved one is a summer’s day.

It’s not just in the realms of literature and news headlines that metaphors abide. Investors keep tabs on bulls and bears; IT geeks compare cloud storage and bandwidth speeds; diplomats argue over yesterday’s Iron Curtain and today’s Arab Spring; physicists dream about strings and the Big Bang; and marketers, when not spouting clichés about pushing envelopes and thinking outside boxes, look at business as battle, with targets to be hit, campaigns planned and competitors fought. Military metaphors are rife in sports, too, with TV commercials and commentators breathlesslyreferring to world cups as though they’re world wars.

In his recent, fascinating book, I is an Other, James Geary makes a convincing case for metaphors shaping the way we view the world. As he says: “Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words”. He delves deep into the use of metaphor by groups and subgroups, and goes on to discuss findings from neuroscience that buttress his argument of metaphor being fundamental to perception. Mirror neurons, for example, which fire when we perform an action as well as when we see others performing a similar action, suggest that we’re hardwired to seek resonance.

Geary mentions the work of cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, whose pioneering 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, did much to make clear the conceptual role of metaphors. In that work, they unpacked a few examples, most famously the way we look at an argument as a war: we defend positions, we attack points of view, we dig in our heels.  Other conceptual metaphors, too, were scrutinised: “time is money”, for instance, or “the mind is a machine”.

Lakoff and Johnson throw light on how we process such metaphors: we reframe the non-physical in terms of the physical.  Abstract concepts that we hold to be important -- such as emotions, ideas and time -- are cast in terms of more tangible concepts such as objects, sensory cues and spatial dimensions. Whether you’re feeling upbeat or downcast, or you find someone hot or cool, you’re speaking metaphorically.

For them, then, metaphorical thinking is supreme, uniting subjective imagination and objective reason. Lakoff has since gone on to work with the US Democrats, trying to promote a vision of society as a “nurturing parent”. His later work has been critiqued by Steven Pinker – who has written eloquently about metaphorical thinking himself, though with a note of caution: “the mind, at some level, must reason very concretely in order that these metaphors be understood and become contagious".

It’s evident, however, that people who seek to influence others, from politicians to advertisers, make use of metaphors to control and shape attitudes. Take nationalism: to call a country a “motherland”, to see residents as “sons of the soil” and to refer to the past as “our heritage” are all designed to elicit a certain response. Thoreau wrote that “all perception of truth is the perception of an analogy” and though we may be unable to live without thinking metaphorically, we can yet be mindful of the ones we choose to live by.

My Apology

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

I apologise, I really do. I meant no harm, and it certainly wasn’t my intention to cause offence to any caste, creed, political party or non-human species. Especially the members of the last category that have claws and can bite.

Allow me to explain. In going over my past reviews and columns, I find that I have occasionally expressed a point of view. I’ve shared opinions. And I’ve criticized writers for not being up to the mark. I’d like to make it clear, now and forever, that I did so without any attempt to denigrate, or for any personal gain. I was not appeasing vote banks, taking aim at the minority, coddling the majority or being pseudo-secular, proto-secular or paleo-secular. (Tick one.)

When I expressed disappointment at the structure of a given novel, I was certainly not alluding to the structure of the great Indian republic, of which I am privileged to be a part. When I showed dismay at an author’s prose style, I wasn’t in any direct or indirect manner taking pot shots at the style of any member of any august legislative body, all of whom are doing a fine job of governing this land.

Let me go further, in an attempt to clear things up for all of those who have the habit of reading between the lines. When I wrote that I was concerned at the declining standards of today’s novels, it was not my intent to slyly refer to the declining standards of the society we live in. When I wrote that I was dismayed at a debut novelist’s follow-up work, I wasn’t referring to the follow-up actions of the country’s police stations and courts, which are and will always remain shining examples of our law-enforcement and justice systems.

It has also been brought to my notice that, on occasion, those about to be charged with real or imagined offences can apply for a wondrous mechanism called anticipatory bail. Think of this piece, then, as this columnist’s version of such an act. It’s not that I am taking back whatever I’ve written or feel that I have done something wrong; it’s simply a matter of clearing the air, wiping the slate clean and setting the record straight.  And it’s not easy to do all three at the same time, believe me.

Of course, not all my writing has been critical and negative. There have also been occasions when I have praised a writer’s work. I’d like to point out that such praise extends only to the work in question, and not to the writer’s caste or religion. I urge those belonging to other creeds not to see this as a veiled attack on their belief systems and not to start demonstrating and chanting slogans outside my house. It’s very difficult to catch up on sleep with such cacophony. Also, noise-cancelling headphones are expensive and the neighbours tend to complain.

Come to think of it, I have also at times applauded writers from other lands. This, again, is not to be construed to mean that I regard other countries as morally superior to India and hence worthy of praise. I have no plans to flee, emigrate or otherwise cross borders and so I would advise all of you -- with the utmost respect for your sentiments, not to mention your sensibilities -- to take a deep breath and calm down.

In closing, a suggestion that, in my opinion, would be the best course to take should you feel you’re about to be offended by me -- or by anyone else, for that matter. Simply turn the page of this paper and read something else. In saying this, I am by no means casting aspersions on your levels of literacy or understanding. All of you are fine and worthy folk and only have the nation’s best interests at heart. I stand ready to take offence at anyone who suggests otherwise.

Philip Roth, Experimental Novelist

My Sunday Guardian column.

“I wake up in the morning, get a big glass of orange juice and read for an hour-and-a-half. I've never done that in my life.” Philip Roth, who announced his retirement last month, seems to be enjoying not writing. "This is nice," he joked in the same recent interview. “They should have told me about it earlier”.

Having re-read all his books, he says the one he’s the most partial to is Sabbath's Theatre, followed by American Pastoral. While those great novels certainly contain all the coruscating power that Roth is known for, there are two others which reveal that he’s adept in not only realistic rants that get under the skin, but also what's called experimental or postmodern fiction -- not exactly a genre you’d associate with Roth.

There’s 1986’s The Counterlife, to begin with, which some claim is his best work. Ingeniously structured to reveal overlapping, alternative lives, it’s narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's famous alter-ego. The novel can be seen as a distorting hall of mirrors: first, Zuckerman attends his brother’s funeral; then, it segues into a section where the brother hasn’t died after all but has left his family to move to a fundamentalist commune in Israel. Later, in an ironic inversion, it's the brother who attends Zuckerman’s funeral. As a coda, there’s a chapter dealing with Zuckerman's non-dead life in idyllic Chiswick, living with an English wife and her family.

Some sections are revealed to have been a draft of a novel written by Zuckerman in an effort to turn reality into fiction; others are more ‘real’, whatever you take that word to mean. One of the subjects of The Counterlife, then, is suggested in a letter written by Zuckerman: “The treacherous imagination is everybody's maker -- we are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other's authors”.

The Counterlife is specifically mentioned in 1993’s Operation Shylock. This novel, sub-titled ‘A Confession’, also toys with convention. It’s narrated by one Philip Roth, a famous writer, who discovers that there’s a character impersonating him in Jerusalem; this person has been attending the thronged trial of an alleged Treblinka guard, and making public pronouncements about a plan to rehabilitate Jews in Europe.

From the start, the ‘real’ Roth claims that this is a true account of events -- among the novel’s characters, there’s his then-wife, English actress Claire Bloom, and his old friend, Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld -- which is why he decides to write it as a testimony rather than as “a Zuckerman followup to The Counterlife”. At one point, the narrator says of his double: “It's Zuckerman, I thought, whimsically, stupidly, escapistly, it’s Kepesh and Tarnopol and Portnoy – it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me.”

Roth goes in search of his doppelganger, tracks him down, and in the process has run-ins with a gallery of other characters: con-men, a rare books dealer, a Palestinian ex-classmate, the impersonator’s girlfriend and more, all of whom he has lengthy debates with. He’s then approached by Israeli intelligence for a covert operation, the details of which, contained in a chapter titled 'Operation Shylock’, have been excised from the novel. The final piece of puckishness comes in the book’s last words: “This confession is false”.

Operation Shylock is looser and baggier than the superbly-structured The Counterlife, but in both, Roth experiments not just for the sake of experiment, but as a way to find newer, more effective containers for his concerns with masculinity, Jewishness and the interplay between fact and fiction. “Art is a lie that tells the truth,” Picasso famously said, and Roth echoes this: “So much of fiction provides the storyteller with the lie to reveal the unspeakable truth”. In our time, no-one’s combined “playful hypothesis and serious supposition” to reveal such truths better than Philip Roth.

A Writer's Silence, A Leader's Roar

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

The ongoing civil war in Syria continues to claim more lives amidst opposing claims and shifting theatres of conflict. At such a time, Syrian writer Nihad Sirees’s novel, The Silence and the Roar – written in 2004 and now available in an English translation by Max Weiss – offers an opportune look at life under a dictatorship.  It’s one of the winners of the 2013 English PEN Awards for Writing in Translation and Sirees, banned from public and cultural life in his country, has spoken in a recent interview of how the book had to be smuggled into Syria from Lebanon. The Silence and the Roar deserves to be read because, in the words of its author, “in a novel, the reader can discover more things than if he simply follows the news”.

At the heart of the book is the ongoing tussle between the silence and roar of its title. The silence is that of its narrator, a writer muzzled by an unnamed tyrannical regime; the roar is that of the Leader, who encourages the populace to hold cacophonous rallies on every occasion. The novel’s events take place during the course of a single day, the twentieth anniversary of the Leader’s coming to power. Naturally, slogan-chanting crowds fill the streets, and for 31-year-old Fathi Sheen, the censored author, the noise is unbearable. As he says, striking a distinctly Orwellian note: “The roar produced by the chants and the megaphones eliminates thought. Thought is retribution, a crime, treason against the Leader. And insofar as calm and tranquillity can incite a person to think, it is essential to drag out the masses to these roaring marches every once in a while in order to brainwash them and keep them from committing the crime of thought”.

In a half-surreal, half-satirical tone Fathi speaks of spending the hot summer’s day in the company of his girlfriend, making his way through crowds and then visiting his mother, living alone after the death of his father -- to discover that she’s planning to get married to one of the Leader’s spineless cronies. This throws up a dilemma: should he give in to the promotional demands of the regime and be “a dummy amidst dummies”, or should he continue to let his silence articulate his opposition?

The satire is broad, and there’s more than a touch of the Kafkaesque, as with another recent novel from France, Phillipe Claudel’s The Investigation. At one point, Fathi tries to enter the ruling party’s building to reclaim his identity card, to be told that only those with identity cards can be admitted. Once inside, he discovers, among other things, that there’s a team of researchers and psychologists whose main occupation is to come up with memorable slogans extolling the regime. (“One, two, three, four, we love the Leader more and more.”) Here, and at many other times in the novel, Sirees punctures the carefully-constructed public image of autocrats.

How do individuals cope with such oppression? “Laughter and sex were our two weapons of survival,” says Fathi when he’s with his girlfriend, putting one in mind of similar satirical work by Egypt-born Albert Cossery. Elsewhere, he states: “Talking to oneself can keep a person insulated from his environment and make him more accepting of the world and all its burdens”. At other times, Fathi speaks of the historical differences between Greek and Persian attitudes towards despots, and Hannah Arendt’s take on the symbiotic relationship between the ruler and the ruled. None of this is to say that the novel becomes bogged down in theory; on the contrary, Fathi’s sometimes-cheeky, sometimes-despairing tone remains engaging throughout.

In a brief afterword included in the English edition, Sirees writes of another, more ominous roar, one that he “never thought the leader would ever be capable of using: the roar of artillery, tanks and fighter jets that have already opened fire on Syrian cities”. The Silence and the Roar is a brave and necessary attempt to fight back.

Branches of Childhood

This appeared in the latest TimeOut Delhi

THE SKINNING TREE Srikumar Sen

It’s not easy to write about the experience of childhood. On one side, there’s the Scylla of being patronizing; on the other, the Charybdis of an adult sensibility colouring the proceedings. In his debut novel, the 81-year-old Srikumar Sen avoids the first and only occasionally strays into the second. His The Skinning Tree is marvellously evocative of the narrator’s childhood in 1940s Calcutta and in a Catholic boarding school in north India.

From its arresting opening that deals with a school matron’s tragic fall off a precipice, the novel submerges us in the mind of the 9-year-old Sabby and his privileged pre-Independence childhood.  He’s snatched from this Eden when his parents, fearing a Japanese invasion, send him away to school. Sabby’s Calcutta escapades, from watching a movie with a friend to making manja to fly kites, are portrayed in just the right tone of childlike wonder and thrill of discovery. The meals during a trip to Mussoorie are symbolic of his worldview: “variations of Windsor soup, Irish stew, Emperor pudding at dinner time and curry and rice and chutneys at lunch”. The effect is spoilt somewhat on the occasions that Sen spells this out in more literal terms.

When he faces the harshness of boarding school, the gentle Sabby begins to change. Sen captures his classmates’ Anglo-Indian patios – “I’m telling you, m’n! Yeah, m’n!” -- and challenges such as the making of a bed or the stealing of a chapatti. The school administrators, “distant disciplinarians in white habits”, keep the boys in line by whipping and caning, and this brutish treatment makes Sabby and his friends brutal too. For sport, they mutilate snakes and squirrels, throwing their carcasses onto a tree-entwined cactus on a nearby slope – the “skinning tree” of the title. Their predicament can again be read as symbolic, especially the fear of an English penny tied to a strap “to make it hurt more”.

Symbolic or otherwise, The Skinning Tree’s primary purpose is in the evocation of a lost time and its lingering effects. As such, the narrative drive can sometimes flag but Sen succeeds wonderfully in recreating sleepy afternoons, bridge-playing evenings, the strangeness of a new school and the in-between world of an Anglicised Indian upbringing.

1984 and 1948

My Sunday Guardian column

The new Penguin edition of George Orwell’s 1984 has a terrific cover that features the author’s name and title masked with black foil. Another reminder of how much Big Brother, Doublespeak and the Thought Police are a part of our lives nowadays. The novel, first published in 1948, was itself inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian fantasy, We, with its brainwashed citizens of a totalitarian One State. Years later, Anthony Burgess riffed on Orwell’s book to come up with 1985, the first part of which was a critique of 1984, with the second part being a rather lacklustre novella that imagined a Britain of the future dominated by militant trade unions and large-scale immigration from the Middle East. (Thus, Burgess’s book, written in the 1970s, was more a reflection of its time than of the future.)

Now, there’s another take on 1984, this time titled 1948. This one doesn’t invent an imagined future; it creates an imaginary past. Its purpose isn’t to alarm or warn, but to entertain. And, unusually, it’s written in verse. In Pushkin sonnets, to be exact – and yes, there’s a sly reference made to a certain Vikram Seth who has done the same thing earlier.

Poet Andy Croft’s 1948 is set in an alternative Britain of, well, 1948. There’s a Labour-Communist alliance in power, Winston Churchill is fulminating from his hideout in Washington and as for the royal family, they’re in exile in Rhodesia along, one supposes, with their corgis. Against this background, on a bright, cold day in April, policeman Winston Smith (that name should sound familiar) comes across a body in a dockyard, and then finds his superior, O’Brien, behaving suspiciously. Dreaming of Julia, his ex-girlfriend, he bumps into an alluring Russian operative called Tamara Zaleshoff (named after an Eric Ambler character) and with a little help from her, manages to untangle the mystery, the climax of which occurs at the opening of London’s Olympic Games.

The fun of reading Croft’s book isn’t in keeping track of events – truth to tell, the plot is thin and underdeveloped, even for such a slim volume – but in the sheer joie de vivre of the verses. Keeping to the strictures of line and length for an extended period isn’t easy (as he writes, it is “in short a verse form that’s designed/for distance runners of the mind”) but Croft pulls it off with panache.

The illustrations by Martin Rowson emphasise the comic-noir feel, along with lines such as: “It doesn’t come cheap, this kind of writing/The dockland scene, the low key lighting/The morally ambiguous tone/That late night, smoky saxophone”. As for Croft’s tonal inspiration: “The shadows on my flickering screen/are shot in black and white and Greene; /Here, every mood’s subdued, crepuscular/Like Hammett, Cain and Hemingway/The only ink I’ve used is grey”. That’s a shade of grey one can approve of. At one point, Winston Smith even picks up a book by Eric Blair, an alternative version of Orwell, a volume that’s “weighed down by overweight prediction/And not buoyed-up by common sense/ It looks too much like heavy going/To get Smith’s mental juices flowing”.

Along the way, there are endless digressions, but after a short while these cease to be departures and add instead to the fun of the reading. Croft is constantly self-reflective: “Though you may say that I’m a dreamer/It seems to me that on the whole/This idiotic rhyming schema/Requires some quality control”.

Dreamer/schema isn’t the only amusingly inventive rhyme here; there’s also tea/ennui as well as this one which deserves to be quoted in full: “Though Pushkin stanzas tend to shuttle/Between High Tragedy and Farce/(It doesn’t do to be too subtle/Or you will end up on your arse)”. Croft certainly doesn’t end up on his arse or on any other part of his anatomy. After a diet of Serious Novels all aspiring to be The Next Big Thing, his little 1948 comes as a breath of fresh air. Orwell that ends well.

Alberto Manguel's Labyrinths

My Sunday Guardian column.

As a teenager in Buenos Aires, Alberto Manguel spent much time reading aloud to the by-then sightless Jorge Luis Borges, an experience he’s written about in the slim memoir, With Borges. Since then, Manguel has become arguably the planet’s most ardent bibliophile, recording his passion in volumes such as A History of Reading, A Reader on Reading and The Library at Night.

He’s made infrequent forays into fiction, too. His 2004 novel, Stevenson Under the Palm Trees, was a literary murder mystery set in Samoa and featuring Robert Louis Stevenson; his new novel, All Men Are Liars, translated from the Spanish by Miranda France, also has an author and a death at its heart. Given that this fictional character is an Argentine, one is tempted to think that he’s based on Borges himself. This proves to not be the case, although All Men Are Liars has more than a few Borgesian touches.

In a recent piece, Manguel wrote of his personal library of over 30,000 books that it was not “a single beast but a composite of many others”. All Men Are Liars is also a composite: not a unified entity but made up of the testimonies of various people from varying vantage points who speak about their memories of the fictional writer in question, one Alejandro Bevilacqua.

The first of the narrators, talking to a journalist hoping to piece together Bevilacqua’s life story, bears the name of Alberto Manguel. This version of Manguel dredges up his knowledge of the writer: childhood in Buenos Aires, later imprisonment by the junta, exile in Madrid, the circumstances leading up to the publication of his one celebrated novel, In Praise of Lies, and his tragic death shortly after, because of a fall from a balcony.

The next narrator starts bluntly: “Alberto Manguel is an asshole”. This is one of the women in Bevilacqua’s life, directly responsible for his novel’s publication. After more digs at Manguel’s reading habit (“All that fantasy, all that invention – it has to end up softening a person’s brain”) she presents a version of events at variance with what’s come before and raises further questions: how exactly did Bevilacqua die? How did he come to write his novel, if indeed it was his? Her account is followed by other narrators, including a Cuban émigré who shared the author’s cell in Argentina and finally, that of the journalist himself.

There is thus a teasing Rashomon-like interplay between the differing accounts. As one of Manguel’s characters says: “Take any number of events in the life of a man, distribute them as you see fit, and you will be left with a character who is unarguably real. Distribute them in a slightly different way and -- voilà! -- the character changes”. The boundary between truth and fiction is shown to be more porous than we think.

Along the way there are other puzzles to ponder -- “Bevilacqua made a distinction between true falsehood and false truth” --  and also riffs on the work of Enrique Vila-Matas as well as a fascinating little digression on the literature of his country, one that ends with: “Lying: that is the great theme of South American literature”.

The mystery of the writer’s death and the manuscript are effectively-handled plot devices that keep one reading, a wrapper for Manguel’s real intentions:  “From our tiny point in the world, how can we observe ourselves without false perceptions? How can we distinguish reality from desire?”  The journalist’s quest, then, to tell the one, coherent story of this multi-faceted character is doomed from the start. This is something that Manguel overstates, reminding us time and again of the protean nature of reality and its interpretation.  

Despite his attempts to make the novel both entertaining and haunting, it’s more of the former than the latter. Still, All Men Are Liars partakes of the spirit of the words of Borges himself: “We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.” 

Found In Translation: My Favourite Fiction of The Year

My Sunday Guardian column.

Most of the fiction I found noteworthy in 2012 was in translation. Here, there was all the inventiveness, ideas and engagement one looked for – often unsuccessfully – in fiction from the English-speaking world. In no particular order, here’s a selection of this year’s titles: a choice that’s both personal and random, given the ones I haven’t yet read (Laszlo Karsznahorkai, Robert Walser) and the ones I haven’t yet been able to get hold of (Bernardo Atxaga, Daniel Sada).

To begin with, Laurent Binet’s HHhH, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, about the British secret service plot to kill Reinhard Heydrich in 1941. (If you’ve seen Operation Daybreak, you already know the story.) HHhH is historical fiction that plays with the conventions of fiction by putting the author’s own misgivings about realism and recreation at its heart. Criticized for the occasionally clunky prose and being too clever by half – with some justification – it’s nevertheless wholly absorbing and engaging.

Also from France is Philippe Claudel’s The Investigation, translated by John Cullen, which tries to out-Kafka Kafka with the story of an unnamed investigator’s efforts to plumb the workings of an entity known as the Firm. As the Investigator spirals towards his nemesis, events become even more nightmarish; an effect balanced by the questions Claudel raises about facelessness and capitalism, among others.

Then, there’s Herman Koch’s The Dinner, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, which has surface similarities with Polanski’s Carnage, but is wickeder and more startling than the movie. Skillfully paced, it depicts the manipulations beneath the surface when two couples meet to discuss their sons’ involvement in an unexpected act of violence, with a denouement that’s as unexpected.

The novel that lays claim to be the most ambitious and luminous of the lot goes to Andres Neuman’s Traveller of the Century, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, which begins with a stranger arriving at a fictional German town in the nineteenth century. It’s been called an example of a “total novel”, encompassing a love story, a murder mystery and debates on art, literature, politics and feminism. Sprawling and bulky but never dull: one of those long novels where the length doesn’t matter.

Also in Spanish, and translated by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, is Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque. This consciously literary novel deals with a trip taken by a Barcelona publisher to Dublin to commemorate his own vision of Bloomsday, and is haunted by the spirit of Joyce – but also by others such as Beckett and Larkin. I hesitate to use the word “inimitable”, but that’s what Vila-Matas’s novels always turn out to be.

It’s long and digressive and stuffed with minor characters, but Grigor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol, first published in 1958 and now translated from the German by Philip Boehm, is endlessly fascinating, with prose that alternates between the ironic and the nostalgic. Set in a small town of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire between the world wars – a place and era lost to time -- it deals with the tragicomic fate of a Quixote-like hussar, a humourless man in a place that values humour.

The Switzerland-based Peter Stamm’s Seven Years was one of my favourites of last year and he follows it up with a short story collection, We’re Flying, translated by Michael Hoffman. In a quiet, sparse, but by no means unaffecting manner, Stamm records the lives of ordinary folk who oscillate between memories of happiness and dealing with its loss, leaving them – as the man with the horn said – kind of blue.

Finally, from the other side of the globe is Fuminori Nakamura’s The Thief, translated from the Japanese by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates. This tells of a Tokyo pickpocket who takes palpable pleasure in his solitary craft before being caught up in a web of events he’s unable to control. These cleverly delineated sequences of action and reaction create an atmosphere of brooding noir and raise questions that are more existential than criminal.