Monday, June 8, 2015

The 100 best novels / No 90 / A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)





The 100 best novels

written in English

No 90

 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)

VS Naipaul’s hellish vision of an African nation’s path to independence saw him accused of racism, but remains his masterpiece


Robert McCrum

Monday 8 June 2015 05.45 BST
“A Bend in the River,” VS Naipaul has written, with that hint of creative inscrutability he cherishes, “remains mysterious.” At the same time, however, it is perhaps the novel that most nearly touches the author’s inner concerns. Salim, who comes from the east coast of Africa, from a long-established Indian trading family, uproots himself to the heart of an unnamed African country as a merchant and sets up shop in an unnamed town at this “bend in the river”. Salim, like Naipaul himself, is under no illusions about his move and declares, in a celebrated opening line: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
Is this the Congo? Naipaul says so, conceding “an echo” of a journey he made to Kinshasa in 1975. His brilliantly reimagined fictional landscape conjures a hellish vision of the developing world’s endemic dislocation. The town in which Salim, “a man without a side”, sets up shop, formerly Arab, then colonial, becomes a microcosm of a society moving towards independence: a place of chaotic and violent change; tribal warfare, ignorance, poverty and human degradation. Salim’s story is punctuated by irruptions of violent death, a tormented love affair and his own complex, terror-struck response to the emergence of “the Big Man”, an archetypal African dictator.

Naipaul, who is of Indian ancestry like Salim, is drawn to this visceral and dangerous scene while being at the same time disdainful of its crudeness and savagery. Salim’s story articulates a vision of disorder and decline in a moment of post-imperial upheaval that has made Naipaul vulnerable to accusations of having reactionary artistic politics.
When, at the end, the character Ferdinand urges Salim to flee for his life, he does so in language that seems to open a window on to Naipaul’s inner vision: “We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning… It’s a nightmare – nowhere is safe now.” Naipaul’s acid contempt for the independence struggle has inspired as much hostile criticism as Conrad for Heart of Darkness (No 32 in this series). Indeed, Naipaul towers next to Conrad, whose work surely inspired this novel. In his prime, Naipaul was the greatest living writer of English prose and this (in my judgment, slightly ahead of Guerrillas and The Enigma of Arrival) is his masterpiece.


A note on the text

A Bend in the River is set in central Africa, yet Naipaul claims he “knew very little about this part of the world when I settled down to write… I had travelled widely and it might have been said that there was nothing clear in my head.”
Nevertheless, the novel seems to have been written fast, from July 1977 to August 1978, with some of it, notably the “easy and complete fabrication” of the character Ferdinand, coming to Naipaul in a dream. He has added subsequently that his dream life has never been as fruitful since.
At first, Naipaul’s literary agent (soon to be fired) judged the book too “cerebral” and, as the author sourly notes, “a year’s work fetched only $25,000”. However, A Bend in the River, published by Knopf in New York in May 1979, immediately won powerful support from reviewers. The critic Elizabeth Hardwick praised “a haunting creation, rich with incident and human bafflement, played out in an immense detail of landscape rendered with poignant brilliance”.

John Updike (No 88 in this series) wrote: “Always a master of fictional landscape, Naipaul here shows, in his variety of human examples and in his search for underlying social causes, a Tolstoyan spirit.” This was especially generous. Updike had just published his own “African novel”, The Coup, and was coming under fire for straying into a landscape he could not understand.
Not everyone was so enchanted. Edward Said attacked a novel that, he declared, continued a long tradition of “hostility to Islam, to the Arabs”. A Bend in The Riverwas shortlisted for the 1979 Booker prize but, perhaps because Naipaul had already won (in 1971) with In a Free State, he was passed over.
Politics has always hovered mutinously off stage in response to Naipaul’s work. When I interviewed him in 2008, he seemed resigned to the adversity and probably indifferent to it. He was already a Nobel laureate, probably the best riposte to the critics.

Three more from VS Naipaul

A House for Mister Biswas (1961); Guerrillas (1975); The Enigma of Arrival (1987).



007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)


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Sunday, June 7, 2015

Horacio Quiroga / How the flamingoes got their stockings


HOW THE FLAMINGOES 
GOT THEIR STOCKINGS
by Horacio Quiroga
BIOGRAPHY
Once the snakes decided that they would give a costume ball; and to make the affair a truly brilliant one they sent invitations to the frogs, the toads, the alligators and the fish.
The fish replied that since they had no legs they would not be able to do much dancing; whereupon, as a special courtesy to them, the ball was held on the shore of the Parana. The fish swam up to the very beach and sat looking on with their heads out of water. When anything pleased them they splashed with their tails.
To make as good an appearance as possible, the alligators put necklaces of bananas around their throats; and they came to the ball smoking big Paraguay cigars. The toads stuck fish scales all over their bodies; and when they walked, they moved their forelegs out and in as though they were swimming. They strutted up and down the beach with very glum, determined faces; and the fish kept calling to them, making fun of their scales. The frogs were satisfied to leave their smooth green skins just as they were; but they bathed themselves in perfume and walked on their hind legs. Besides, each one carried a lightning bug, which waved to and fro like a lantern, at the end of a string in the frog’s hand.
But the best costumes of all were worn by the snakes. All of them, without exception, had dancing gowns of the color of their skins. There were red snakes, and brown snakes, and pink snakes, and yellow snakes—each with a garment of tulle to match. The yarara, who is a kind of rattler, came in a single-piece robe of gray tulle with brick-colored stripes—for that is the way the yarara dresses even when he is not going to a ball. The coral snakes were prettier still. They draped themselves in a gauze of reds, whites and blacks; and when they danced, they wound themselves round and round like corkscrews, rising on the tips of their tails, coiling and uncoiling, balancing this way and that. They were the most graceful and beautiful of all the snakes, and the guests applauded them wildly.
The flamingoes were the only ones who seemed not to be having a good time. Stupid birds that they were, they had not thought of any costumes at all. They came with the plain white legs they had at that time and the thick, twisted bills they have even now. Naturally they were envious of all the gowns they saw, but most of all, of the fancy dress of the coral snakes. Every time one of these went by them, courtesying, pirouetting, balancing, the flamingoes writhed with jealousy. For no one, meanwhile, was asking them to dance.
“I know what we must do,” said one of the flamingoes at last. “We must go and get some stockings for our legs—pink, black and white like the coral snakes themselves—then they will all fall in love with us!”
The whole flock of them took wing immediately and flew across the river to a village nearby. They went to the store and knocked:
“Tan! Tan! Tan!”
“Who is it?” called the storekeeper.
“We’re the flamingoes. We have come to get some stockings—pink, black, and white.”
“Are you crazy?” the storekeeper answered. “I keep stockings for people, not for silly birds. Besides, stockings of such colors! You won’t find any in town, either!”
The flamingoes went on to another store:
“Tan! Tan! Tan! We are looking for stockings—pink, black and white. Have you any?”
“Pink, black and white stockings! Don’t you know decent people don’t wear such things? You must be crazy! Who are you, anyway?”
“We are the flamingoes,” the flamingoes replied.
“In that case you are silly flamingoes! Better go somewhere else!”
They went to still a third store:
“Tan! Tan! Pink, black and white stockings! Got any?”
“Pink, black and white nonsense!” called the storekeeper. “Only birds with big noses like yours could ask for such a thing. Don’t make tracks on my floor!”
And the man swept them into the street with a broom.
So the flamingoes went from store to store, and everywhere people called them silly, stupid birds.
However, an owl, a mischievous tatu, who had just been down to the river to get some water, and had heard all about the ball and the flamingoes, met them on his way back and thought he would have some fun with them.
“Good evening, good evening, flamingoes,” he said, making a deep bow, though, of course, it was just to ridicule the foolish birds. “I know what you are looking for. I doubt if you can get any such stockings in town. You might find them in Buenos Aires; but you would have to order them by mail. My sister-in-law, the barn owl, has stockings like that, however. Why don’t you go around and see her? She can give you her own and borrow others from her family.”
“Thanks! Thanks, ever so much!” said the flamingoes; and they flew off to the cellar of a barn where the barn owl lived.
“Tan! Tan! Good evening, Mrs. Owl,” they said. “A relation of yours, Mr. Tatu, advised us to call on you. Tonight, as you know, the snakes are giving a costume ball, and we have no costumes. If you could lend us your pink, black and white stockings, the coral snakes would be sure to fall in love with us!”
“Pleased to accommodate you,” said the barn owl. “Will you wait just a moment?”
She flew away and was gone some time. When she came back she had the stockings with her. But they were not real stockings. They were nothing but skins from coral snakes which the owl had caught and eaten during the previous days.
“Perhaps these will do,” she remarked. “But if you wear them at the ball, I advise you to do strictly as I say: dance all night long, and don’t stop a moment. For if you do, you will get into trouble, I assure you!”
The flamingoes listened to what she said; but, stupidly, did not try to guess what she could have meant by such counsel. They saw no danger in the pretty stockings. Delightedly they doubled up their claws like fists, stuck them through the snakeskins, which were like so many long rubber tubes, and flew back as quickly as they could to the ball.
When the guests at the dance saw the flamingoes in such handsome stockings, they were as jealous as could be. You see, the coral snakes were the lions of the evening, and after the flamingoes came back, they would dance with no one but the flamingoes. Remembering the instructions of the barn owl, the flamingoes kept their feet going all the time, and the snakes could not see very clearly just what those wonderful stockings were.
After a time, however, they grew suspicious. When a flamingo came dancing by, the snakes would get down off the ends of their tails to examine its feet more closely. The coral snakes, more than anybody else, began to get uneasy. They could not take their eyes off those stockings, and they got as near as they could, trying to touch the legs of the flamingoes with the tips of their tongues—for snakes use their tongues to feel with, much as people use their hands. But the flamingoes kept dancing and dancing all the while, though by this time they were getting so tired they were about ready to give up.
The coral snakes understood that sooner or later the flamingoes would have to stop. So they borrowed the lightning bugs from the frogs, to be ready when the flamingoes fell from sheer exhaustion.
And in fact, it was not long before one of the birds, all tired out, tripped over the cigar in an alligator’s mouth, and fell down on her side. The coral snakes all ran toward her with their lanterns, and held the lightning bugs up so close that they could see the feet of the flamingo as clearly as could be.
“Aha! Aha! Stockings, eh? Stockings, eh?” The coral snakes began to hiss so loudly that people could hear them on the other side of the Parana.
The cry was taken up by all the snakes: “They are not wearing stockings! We know what they have done! The flamingoes have been killing brothers of ours, and they are wearing their skins as stockings! Those pretty legs each stand for the murder of a coral snake!”
At this uproar, the flamingoes took fright and tried to fly away. But they were so tired from all the dancing that not one of them could move a wing. The coral snakes darted upon them, and began to bite at their legs, tearing off the false stockings bit by bit, and, in their rage, sinking their fangs deep into the feet and legs of the flamingoes.
The flamingoes, terrified and mad with pain, hopped this way and that, trying to shake their enemies off. But the snakes did not let go till every last shred of stocking had been torn away. Then they crawled off, to rearrange their gauze costumes that had been much rumpled in the fray. They did not try to kill the flamingoes then and there; for most coral snakes are poisonous; and they were sure the birds they had bitten would die sooner or later anyway.
But the flamingoes did not die. They hopped down to the river and waded out into the water to relieve their pain. Their feet and legs, which had been white before, had now turned red from the poison in the bites. They stood there for days and days, trying to cool the burning ache, and hoping to wash out the red.

“The flamingoes ... hopped down to the river, and waded out ... to relieve their pain.”
But they did not succeed. And they have not succeeded yet. The flamingoes still pass most of their time standing on their red legs out in the water. Occasionally they go ashore and walk up and down for a few moments to see if they are getting well. But the pain comes again at once, and they hurry back into the water. Even there they sometimes feel an ache in one of their feet; and they lift it out to warm it in their feathers. They stand that way on one leg for hours, I suppose because the other one is so stiff and lame.
That is why the flamingoes have red legs instead of white. And the fishes know it too. They keep coming up to the top of the water and crying “Red legs! Red legs! Red legs!” to make fun of the flamingoes for having tried to borrow costumes for a ball. On that account, the flamingoes are always at war with the fishes. As they wade up and down, and a fish comes up too close in order to shout “Red legs” at them, they dip their long bills down and catch it if they can.




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Saturday, June 6, 2015

Quiroga, Kipling, and the Exotic Frontier / A Comparative Study

Rudyard Kipling
Quiroga, Kipling, 
and the Exotic Frontier:

A Comparative Study

 BIOGRAPHY OF HORACIO QUIROGA


by Christy Rodgers
San Francisco State University


Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), Latin American master of the short story, was not hailed as such by the literary generation that succeeded him. Jorge Luis Borges (compatriot of Quiroga's adopted country, Argentina) summarily dismissed him by remarking that Quiroga merely "wrote stories that Poe or Kipling had already written better" (qtd. in Flores 17). In fact, Quiroga, without the disdain for literary apprenticeship that Borges appeared to demonstrate, did list both Poe and Kipling as two of four masters of the form, in a much-cited manifesto on the art of the story, the "Manual del Perfecto Cuentista" ["Guide for the Perfect Storyteller"]. In the very first of his "ten commandments," Quiroga speaks explicitly of discipleship: "Cree en el maestro—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chekhov—como en Dios mismo" (qtd. in Lazo xxxiv) [Believe in the master ... as in God himself].1 But as Raimundo Lazo, editor of the 1968 Sepan Cuentos edition of Quiroga's stories and criticism, points out in his introduction, this faith is clearly meant by Quiroga to be "estímulo, no imitación" (qtd. in Lazo xiv) [a stimulus not an imitation].
Horacio Quiroga

Quiroga wrote over two hundred short stories varying widely in quality and content. He set his hand to a variety of "tales of effect,"2 from the pure horror of "The Feather Pillow" or re-told tales like "The Suicide Ships," which link him strongly with Poe, to psycho-dramas like "The Single Diamond" which are closer to Maupassant. But it is almost universally acknowledged that his best stories are set in Misiones, the tropical borderland of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, which he had visited as a young man, and to which he continued to return for extended periods of time throughout his life.
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Friday, June 5, 2015

Kipling / The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows

The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows
By Rudyard Kipling

“If I can attain Heaven for a pice, why should you be envious?”
Opium Smoker’s Proverb

This is no work of mine. My friend, Gabral Misquitta, the half-caste, spoke it all, between moonset and morning, six weeks before he died; and I took it down from his mouth as he answered my questions so:—
It lies between the Copper-smith’s Gully and the pipe-stem sellers’ quarter, within a hundred yards, too, as the crow flies, of the Mosque of Wazir Khan. I don’t mind telling any one this much, but I defy him to find the Gate, however well he may think he knows the City. You might even go through the very gully it stands in a hundred times, and be none the wiser. We used to call the gully, “the Gully of the Black Smoke,” but its native name is altogether different of course. A loaded donkey couldn’t pass between the walls; and, at one point, just before you reach the Gate, a bulged house-front makes people go along all sideways.
It isn’t really a gate though. It’s a house. Old Fung–Tching had it first five years ago. He was a boot-maker in Calcutta. They say that he murdered his wife there when he was drunk. That was why he dropped bazar-rum and took to the Black Smoke instead. Later on, he came up north and opened the Gate as a house where you could get your smoke in peace and quiet. Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas, that you can find all over the City. No; the old man knew his business thoroughly, and he was most clean for a Chinaman. He was a one-eyed little chap, not much more than five feet high, and both his middle fingers were gone. All the same, he was the handiest man at rolling black pills I have ever seen. Never seemed to be touched by the Smoke, either; and what he took day and night, night and day, was a caution. I’ve been at it five years, and I can do my fair share of the Smoke with any one; but I was a child to Fung–Tching that way. All the same, the old man was keen on his money, very keen; and that’s what I can’t understand. I heard he saved a good deal before he died, but his nephew has got all that now; and the old man’s gone back to China to be buried.
He kept the big upper room, where his best customers gathered, as neat as a new pin. In one corner used to stand Fung–Tching’s Joss — almost as ugly as Fung–Tching — and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt ’em when the pipes were going thick. Opposite the Joss was Fung–Tching’s coffin. He had spent a good deal of his savings on that, and whenever a new man came to the Gate he was always introduced to it. It was lacquered black, with red and gold writings on it, and I’ve heard that Fung–Tching brought it out all the way from China. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I know that, if I came first in the evening, I used to spread my mat just at the foot of it. It was a quiet corner you see, and a sort of breeze from the gully came in at the window now and then. Besides the mats, there was no other furniture in the room — only the coffin, and the old Joss all green and blue and purple with age and polish.
Fung–Tching never told us why he called the place “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows.” (He was the only Chinaman I know who used bad-sounding fancy names. Most of them are flowery. As you’ll see in Calcutta.) We used to find that out for ourselves. Nothing grows on you so much, if you’re white, as the Black Smoke. A yellow man is made different. Opium doesn’t tell on him scarcely at all; but white and black suffer a good deal. Of course, there are some people that the Smoke doesn’t touch any more than tobacco would at first. They just doze a bit, as one would fall asleep naturally, and next morning they are almost fit for work. Now, I was one of that sort when I began, but I’ve been at it for five years pretty steadily, and its different now. There was an old aunt of mine, down Agra way, and she left me a little at her death. About sixty rupees a month secured. Sixty isn’t much. I can recollect a time, seems hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that I was getting my three hundred a month, and pickings, when I was working on a big timber contract in Calcutta.
I didn’t stick to that work for long. The Black Smoke does not allow of much other business; and even though I am very little affected by it, as men go, I couldn’t do a day’s work now to save my life. After all, sixty rupees is what I want. When old Fung–Tching was alive he used to draw the money for me, give me about half of it to live on (I eat very little), and the rest he kept himself. I was free of the Gate at any time of the day and night, and could smoke and sleep there when I liked, so I didn’t care. I know the old man made a good thing out of it; but that’s no matter. Nothing matters, much to me; and, besides, the money always came fresh and fresh each month.
There was ten of us met at the Gate when the place was first opened. Me, and two Baboos from a Government Office somewhere in Anarkulli, but they got the sack and couldn’t pay (no man who has to work in the daylight can do the Black Smoke for any length of time straight on); a Chinaman that was Fung–Tching’s nephew; a bazar-woman that had got a lot of money somehow; an English loafer — Mac–Somebody I think, but I have forgotten — that smoked heaps, but never seemed to pay anything (they said he had saved Fung–Tching’s life at some trial in Calcutta when he was a barrister): another Eurasian, like myself, from Madras; a half-caste woman, and a couple of men who said they had come from the North. I think they must have been Persians or Afghans or something. There are not more than five of us living now, but we come regular. I don’t know what happened to the Baboos; but the bazar-woman she died after six months of the Gate, and I think Fung–Tching took her bangles and nose-ring for himself. But I’m not certain. The Englishman, he drank as well as smoked, and he dropped off. One of the Persians got killed in a row at night by the big well near the mosque a long time ago, and the Police shut up the well, because they said it was full of foul air. They found him dead at the bottom of it. So, you see, there is only me, the Chinaman, the half-caste woman that we call the Memsahib (she used to live with Fung–Tching), the other Eurasian, and one of the Persians. The Memsahib looks very old now. I think she was a young woman when the Gate was opened; but we are all old for the matter of that. Hundreds and hundreds of years old. It is very hard to keep count of time in the Gate, and besides, time doesn’t matter to me. I draw my sixty rupees fresh and fresh every month. A very, very long while ago, when I used to be getting three hundred and fifty rupees a month, and pickings, on a big timber-contract at Calcutta, I had a wife of sorts. But she’s dead now. People said that I killed her by taking to the Black Smoke. Perhaps I did, but it’s so long since it doesn’t matter. Sometimes when I first came to the Gate, I used to feel sorry for it; but that’s all over and done with long ago, and I draw my sixty rupees fresh and fresh every month, and am quite happy. Not DRUNK happy, you know, but always quiet and soothed and contented.
How did I take to it? It began at Calcutta. I used to try it in my own house, just to see what it was like. I never went very far, but I think my wife must have died then. Anyhow, I found myself here, and got to know Fung–Tching. I don’t remember rightly how that came about; but he told me of the Gate and I used to go there, and, somehow, I have never got away from it since. Mind you, though, the Gate was a respectable place in Fung–Tching’s time where you could be comfortable, and not at all like the chandoo-khanas where the niggers go. No; it was clean and quiet, and not crowded. Of course, there were others beside us ten and the man; but we always had a mat apiece with a wadded woollen head-piece, all covered with black and red dragons and things; just like a coffin in the corner.
At the end of one’s third pipe the dragons used to move about and fight. I’ve watched ’em, many and many a night through. I used to regulate my Smoke that way, and now it takes a dozen pipes to make ’em stir. Besides, they are all torn and dirty, like the mats, and old Fung–Tching is dead. He died a couple of years ago, and gave me the pipe I always use now — a silver one, with queer beasts crawling up and down the receiver-bottle below the cup. Before that, I think, I used a big bamboo stem with a copper cup, a very small one, and a green jade mouthpiece. It was a little thicker than a walking-stick stem, and smoked sweet, very sweet. The bamboo seemed to suck up the smoke. Silver doesn’t, and I’ve got to clean it out now and then, that’s a great deal of trouble, but I smoke it for the old man’s sake. He must have made a good thing out of me, but he always gave me clean mats and pillows, and the best stuff you could get anywhere.
When he died, his nephew Tsin-ling took up the Gate, and he called it the “Temple of the Three Possessions;” but we old ones speak of it as the “Hundred Sorrows,” all the same. The nephew does things very shabbily, and I think the Memsahib must help him. She lives with him; same as she used to do with the old man. The two let in all sorts of low people, niggers and all, and the Black Smoke isn’t as good as it used to be. I’ve found burnt bran in my pipe over and over again. The old man would have died if that had happened in his time. Besides, the room is never cleaned, and all the mats are torn and cut at the edges. The coffin has gone — gone to China again — with the old man and two ounces of smoke inside it, in case he should want ’em on the way.
The Joss doesn’t get so many sticks burnt under his nose as he used to; that’s a sign of ill-luck, as sure as Death. He’s all brown, too, and no one ever attends to him. That’s the Memsahib’s work, I know; because, when Tsin-ling tried to burn gilt paper before him, she said it was a waste of money, and, if he kept a stick burning very slowly, the Joss wouldn’t know the difference. So now we’ve got the sticks mixed with a lot of glue, and they take half-an-hour longer to burn, and smell stinky. Let alone the smell of the room by itself. No business can get on if they try that sort of thing. The Joss doesn’t like it. I can see that. Late at night, sometimes, he turns all sorts of queer colors — blue and green and red — just as he used to do when old Fung–Tching was alive; and he rolls his eyes and stamps his feet like a devil.
I don’t know why I don’t leave the place and smoke quietly in a little room of my own in the bazar. Most like, Tsin-ling would kill me if I went away — he draws my sixty rupees now — and besides, it’s so much trouble, and I’ve grown to be very fond of the Gate. It’s not much to look at. Not what it was in the old man’s time, but I couldn’t leave it. I’ve seen so many come in and out. And I’ve seen so many die here on the mats that I should be afraid of dying in the open now. I’ve seen some things that people would call strange enough; but nothing is strange when you’re on the Black Smoke, except the Black Smoke. And if it was, it wouldn’t matter. Fung–Tching used to be very particular about his people, and never got in any one who’d give trouble by dying messy and such. But the nephew isn’t half so careful. He tells everywhere that he keeps a “first-chop” house. Never tries to get men in quietly, and make them comfortable like Fung–Tching did. That’s why the Gate is getting a little bit more known than it used to be. Among the niggers of course. The nephew daren’t get a white, or, for matter of that, a mixed skin into the place. He has to keep us three of course — me and the Memsahib and the other Eurasian. We’re fixtures. But he wouldn’t give us credit for a pipeful — not for anything.
One of these days, I hope, I shall die in the Gate. The Persian and the Madras man are terrible shaky now. They’ve got a boy to light their pipes for them. I always do that myself. Most like, I shall see them carried out before me. I don’t think I shall ever outlive the Memsahib or Tsin-ling. Women last longer than men at the Black–Smoke, and Tsin-ling has a deal of the old man’s blood in him, though he DOES smoke cheap stuff. The bazar-woman knew when she was going two days before her time; and SHE died on a clean mat with a nicely wadded pillow, and the old man hung up her pipe just above the Joss. He was always fond of her, I fancy. But he took her bangles just the same.
I should like to die like the bazar-woman — on a clean, cool mat with a pipe of good stuff between my lips. When I feel I’m going, I shall ask Tsin-ling for them, and he can draw my sixty rupees a month, fresh and fresh, as long as he pleases, and watch the black and red dragons have their last big fight together; and then. . . .
Well, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters much to me — only I wished Tsin-ling wouldn’t put bran into the Black Smoke.

 1884.




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My hero / Ali Smith by Alex Clark




Ali Smith in her garden at home in Cambridge. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer


My hero: Ali Smith by Alex Clark



It’s fitting that such a generous and open novelist, and such a champion of other writers, should win this year’s Baileys women’s prize for fiction 


Alex Clark
Fri 5 Jun 2015

In April, at a literary festival in her adopted home of Cambridge – the town she eventually settled in after growing up in Inverness, and where she began to write in earnest – Ali Smith presided over a panel of debut writers. The event is an annual fixture, in which Smith, who this week won the Baileys women’s prize for fiction for How to Be Both, selects the first novels that have most impressed her and introduces their fledgling authors to the public. Before each of the three – Sarah Bannan, Claire Lowdon and Sara Taylor – read from their books, Smith explained why she had chosen them, in a way that could hardly have given less sense of a grande dame of literature bestowing her imprimatur: warm, funny, communicative, yes – but also urgently engaged with the texts at hand. She congratulated the writers on doing something hard and daunting, and beckoned the audience in to share a world of stimulation and pleasure. Afterwards, people rushed to buy all three books. This is not a common state of affairs.

 But it is a common state of Smith. She is an endless booster of other writers’ work (dead or alive), because she believes in people and in words. She believes in a literary ecology that needs care and attention to flourish and without which we will be the poorer. “In all our individual states,” she has told me, “we are always communal. There is always a point where a hand reaches out to another hand.”

 The hand reaching out is there in all her work, drawing us close so we can hear whispered, mischievous stories of love, death, loss and otherness, stories that are both strikingly real and dreamily mythical. How to Be Both is a novel of companionship, its protagonists – a motherless modern teenager and a striving Renaissance artist – holding hands across the centuries; its paired stories are accessible to readers in whichever order they choose. It’s a book founded on the generosity and openness of its creator, and it simply wouldn’t have worked any other way.
THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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