All About H. Hatterr [Paperback]

Wildly funny and wonderfully bizarre,All About H. Hatterris 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.”“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