Mr Kalu Singh

Writes from Cambridge

Dear Ann Diamond                                                

Greetings!

May I introduce myself. I am Mr Kalu Iqbal Singh, an India-born pensioner, living in  Cambridge England. In my working years I was a university counselor and a civil servant.  I am a published writer - very minor, but keen - whose works were once translated into Spanish, Portuguese and Croatian. I'm also a very amateur translator, having just done a first draft of an original presentation of  Plato's first and tiny dialogue Euthyphro . In the middle of the Covid Plague, I got an email from a psychiatrist-translator in Tehran saying he was producing a Persian/Farsi translation of "Guilt". It was deeply gratifying to receive kind words from the other side of the world about a (very short) book I wrote over twenty years ago. I hope you will feel the same.   

I am writing only to praise your book  : not to ask for any favours.

" I have read it three times. ...It has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years."  Eliot wrote these words to Scott Fitzgerald to thank him for his gift of The Great Gatsby. This year I have read your novel Dead White Males four times. I've also read The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year  by Sue Townsend (2012)  four times : Flann O' Brien's The Hard Life, (1961), three times: and Maugham's short story Winter Cruise, (1920) six. As for writing, I've spent almost the whole year, attempting a translation of Aristotle's Poetics. I mention these other authors because literary critics, when praising, are obliged to mention both comparators and their standards of comparison. But there of course remains the psychological dimension noted by Bettelheim. The sense of enchantment, a ravishing sense of being in chains, that a book might induce in the Reader, prompting repeated readings, is a powerful but mostly unconscious awareness that this book is necessary for some deep anchoring of self in understanding. Not only do children feel this about fairy stories, but even adults like Eliot might quite never know what they need from a character. Such was your book for me.

It was only by chance that I found it - in Houseman's near Kings Cross Station, London : probably the last socialist bookshop on the island. I might not have taken the chance elsewhere : for I read little detective prose, despite watching thousands of hours of Mariska Hegarty's sublime Law & Order SVU.  Whoever said "Poe, Doyle and Chandler divide lit-tec style between them: imitators trip over cliches" would get my vote. But I saw quickly that your book had genuine dignity and daring.

One of the most impressive qualities of your novel was that its engaging momentum of recognition &  reversal outpaced comprehensibility without becoming tedious or annoying. The principal idea in Aristotle's masterpiece is that there are limits based on human psychology : that there must be both a balance of and between the elements of a story - insufficiency and excess will forestall catharsis and laughter. Perhaps the funniest proof of this  is "The most famous anecdote about the production [of The Big Sleep] is that no one could decide whether a particular character killed himself or was murdered – and if so by whom. When Hawks cabled Chandler to ask him, the author cabled back to say that he didn't know, either."  [bbbc.com/culture/article/20210812]   But for the reader and filmgoer it doesn't matter: enough is connected, and by such good prose.

Besides that question there is the other "What does the story mean?" . The element of thought is presented through the thinking of the characters, through the thoughts of the narrator, who might also be a character, and through the very structure that the author chooses even if s/he never articulates any precise thoughts. I included the comparators named above for your subtlety of meaning matches theirs. What is striking about Flann O Brien's 1940 novel  is its oblique but passionate feminism. The author was, unlike Joyce, typical of his generation of priest-ridden Irishmen who didn't quite know what to do with women - real or fictional. But Collopy is truly heroic in his willingness to consider revolutionary violence and to make an actual  challenge in person to the Pope, in order to provide women creature comforts that they too might be contributing citizens in the shared city. One meaning of Townsend's novel,  which like yours ranges from the present to the horrors of WWII, might be given as - Satyagraha in an English provincial town. Her  heroine, like your characters, is taken to the limit that any author can go - states of reference. My later readings of your novel began to persuade me that one of  your principle meanings was of the integrity of a woman's burning desire to offer a thesis to the ungendered guardians of the Republic of Letters. This is beautifully counterbalanced by the larky cathexes between Denning and Maggott. 

"He reminded me of a fancy heron tiptoeing across some beach.... Blonde babes are often squinters. I enjoyed your prose style. Of many examples, I admired the balance in the first sentence between precise and indeterminate  adjectives and the respectful adverb in the second. And I gasped at the daring & witty use of the eye metaphor on page 29. I conjectured that Vera A Utall was an anagram but couldn't solve it. And also that the rich, fatherless boy, living with his mad mother, desperately seducing maids and writing poetry, was Cohen - before I saw online that you knew him.

I made many other notes about your book. But I am mindful that you might have become bored with my reflections many paragraphs ago. If not, let me know and we can converse by ether, if not across good gimlets. Please could you send me the references for the critical appraisal of your book that you most respect.

I close reaffirming my pleasure in your story. And,

Merry Christmas!

yours sincerely

Kalu 

Cambridge

England