Word: hatterr
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WHEN All About H. Hatterr was first published in 1948, it received almost universally favorable critical notices. It was immediately successful, and seemed likely to establish its author as a first-rank novelist. But because of the strange interactions of whimsical public tastes and the mechanics of the modern publishing world, it slipped into literary limbo, becoming another in the long list of "underground classics...
...ABOUT H. HATTERR by G.V. Desani. 287 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/roux...
Some books make the reviewer want to shout; others, to weep; still others, to pontificate. All About H. Hatterr makes one simply want to point at the words on the page. When a novel speaks for itself with such a bizarre and delightful voice as this one does, to paraphrase would be travesty. What can be said in mere critical language, for example, about the following passage, which ends the book...
Desani's hero, H. Hatterr, is an Anglo-Indian and a "true spiritual devil-may-care." In seven symmetrical chapters, he seeks enlightenment from some sages of India, then sets out to the countryside to apply his new-found wisdom. Each adventure turns out to be a con game, with somebody else working the con and Hatterr as the game. Attempting to exorcise the mystical fit of an itinerant bard, he is himself accused of being possessed by a spirit and is nearly burned alive on a pyre. "Damme," he says, "this is Life and contrast...
Contrast is Desani's key philosophical concept. Make no mistake. All About H. Hatterr is a philosophical novel that deals, however obliquely, with such eternal conundrums as love, free will and appearance and reality. Its protagonist formulates no doctrines. But without ever quite losing his innocence, he does arrive at a visionary acceptance of all mortal matters as so much moonlight on the Ganges. "To hell with judging!" he concludes. "I have no opinions, I am beaten, and I just accept all this phenomena, this diamond-cut-diamond game, this human horseplay, this topsy-turvyism, as Life, as contrast...