Jaded yawn
When I opened The Observer’s homepage this morning, my eyes glanced over the picture of the handsome woman at the top. I saw the headline: “Monica Ali: British fashion’s next big thing”. Right. And so I continued down the page looking for the link to the book reviews. But she was there too. Ah: for “fashion” read “fiction”. According to the journalist, using the deep resources of language at her disposal, Ali is “being hailed as a new Zadie Smith.” One presumes this is nothing to do with her good looks. No, because her first novel, Brick Lane, “Focus[es] on a cross-section of the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets, a community all but invisible to the rest of London. Ali’s novel is warm, shrewd, startling and hugely readable: the sort of book you race through greedily, dreading the last page.”
Not my kind of book then. Still, as my shoulders drooped at the prospect of yet another “sharply observed� novel about ethnic diversity in London, I recalled this passage from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower:
“A well-read man, hearing of the latest ‘great book’, can give a jaded yawn, assuming the work to be a sort of composite derived from all the fine works he has ever read. But the fact is that a great book is not just the sum of existing masterpieces; it is particular and unforeseeable, being made out of something which, because it lies somewhere beyond that existing sum, cannot be deduced simply from acquaintance, however close.”
Yes. Except, the word “unforeseeable” doesn’t seem quite right.
I also recalled the story of Rahila Khan. She published a book called Down the Road, Worlds Away in 1987. It received much praise for its sharp observation of ethnic diversity in London. However, a photograph of her face was never splashed across the Review pages. Not so much because Rahila lacked beauty however. She lacked existence. In fact, Rahila Khan was a parish priest in Brighton called Toby Forward. When the publisher found out, it withdrew the book, and all those who queued up to praise the book, queued up to condemn it. Presumably, once the “true identity” of the author was discovered, the ink underwent some magical metamorphosis and read like Jeffrey Archer on an off day.
You can read about the “scandal” in KK Ruthven’s book Faking Literature in which the author “argues that the production of a literary forgery is an act that reveals the spurious nature of literature itself”. Apparently, Ali has worked in marketing, design and branding. So, she’s used to spurious professions.
I read Harriet Lane’s article on Monica Ali hoping to read about a writer. But you won’t find any mention of literature. Maybe that’s “the next big thing”.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Yawn Despite my unease about making Book of th…
- The intimacy of this distress
- It’s All French To Me
- Minor literature
- The great tired of London-by-the-sea
