"A beautiful writer"

That his name was perhaps not as familiar outside literary circles as it deserved (he was always well respected by other authors: Salman Rushdie called him "a beautiful writer", and to Edward Blishen he was "simply one of the most astonishingly good novelists of our time") may be because Roy was not one to parade details of his personal life in public, believing that his work should speak for itself. As he explained in "Art and Experience", his 1983 Edgar Mittelholzer memorial lecture, delivered in Georgetown: "The price the artist pays for his egotism is a high one. On one level egotism obliges him to create, while the same egotism threatens to destroy him. Success not only goes to his head, it remains there, creating demands he cannot hope to satisfy. I am acutely aware of all this and therefore try to shun gratuitous publicity."

-- From Margaret Busby's obituary of the late Roy A.K. Heath in today's UK Guardian. There is also appended a moving personal note by Anne Walmsley, Heath's first editor (and good friend of the CRB).

Further: the Literary Saloon offers excerpts from three reviews of Heath's novels.

No proud native son

If the measure of a writer’s success is the ire he provokes, then V.S. Naipaul is a spectacular success in Trinidad.... “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul wrote in “The Middle Passage” (1962) -- the first sign that he wasn’t going to play the proud native son. A fresher wound came in 2001, when Naipaul omitted any mention of Trinidad from his initial press release after winning the Nobel Prize, which many here saw as a deliberate rebuff.

This weekend's New York Times Book Review includes an article by David Shaftel on Naipaul's often fraught relationship with the island of his birth--from his portrayal of Trinidad in his early books to the controversial events of his visit in 2007. In his piece Shaftel quotes no fewer than three people connected with the CRB: our frequent contributor Georgia Popplewell, the magazine's editor Jeremy Taylor, and (though Shaftel doesn't name him) our contributing editor Brendan de Caires, who reviewed Naipaul's latest book, A Writer's People, in our February 2008 issue.

R.I.P. Roy A.K. Heath (1926-2008)

The Stabroek News reports today that the Guyanese novelist Roy A.K. Heath--author of The Murderer, The Shadow Bride, and eight other novels--has died in London. The Guyana Arts Forum, in a press release, says: "As a novelist, Heath represented a liberal imagination in his reinterpretations of the experiences of the diverse strands of humanity he found in the society."

Could it be Derek!

Browsing through the current issue of the London Review of Books, I come across the following, in a review by Tony Wood of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms:

Perhaps the most brilliant piece in ‘Sluchai’ is the pseudo-play ‘Pushkin and Gogol’. Gogol falls onto the stage from behind the curtain and lies still; Pushkin enters, trips over Gogol and falls, crying: ‘What the devil! Could it be Gogol!’ Now Gogol gets up, walks and immediately trips over Pushkin, who gets up again, only to trip over Gogol. And so on until the two exit the stage, each still exclaiming his annoyance at tripping over the other.

I find myself giggling at the thought of an adaptation of this playlet featuring not Pushkin and Gogol but our own Naipaul and Walcott....

Dinner with Vidia

In the Indian Economic Times, Vikram Doctor leafs through V.S. Naipaul's books looking for references to meals, concluding that Naipaul is no foodie--"in Naipaul’s novels if food is consumed with enjoyment it usually has disastrous consequences"--but "as a writer who builds on carefully noted details, he uses observation of food--its preparation, rituals, consumption--to convey larger points." (Doctor also reveals that Naipaul's sister Savi makes a mean dosti roti.)

Links, links, links

- In today's Stabroek News, a substantial (though unsigned) obituary of the late Wordsworth McAndrew:

With the onset of state-sponsored international cultural events such as the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts and with state control of radio broadcasting, there was much less space for McAndrew’s way of doing things. Independent and individualistic, he still spoke as he liked, wrote as he liked and dressed as he liked. He was ill at ease with the bureaucratic formalities and the orthodoxy of the well-dressed career civil servants who ran the Ministry of Culture. He quit the public service and the country prematurely, forfeiting his superannuation benefits and going into exile in 1978 to languish in obscurity as an underpaid copy editor in New York.

- Speaking of the Caribbean Festival of the Arts a.k.a. Carifesta: also in today's Stabroek News, Al Creighton reports that Derek Walcott will be the guest of honour at Carifesta X in Guyana in August, even though in the past he has been "very critical of the festival, launching a devastating broadside against its merits and its contribution to the development of the arts in the region."

- Meanwhile, the Carifesta organisers still haven't posted a proper schedule of events on the festival website, but if you poke around a bit you'll find a PDF document that lists five "signal exhibitions" on the visual arts programme: shows of "Voodoo Art" from Haiti and "Djuka Art" from Suriname, retrospectives by Stanley Greaves of Guyana/Barbados and Ras Akyem and Ras Ishi Butcher of Barbados, and also a retrospective by Trinidadian LeRoy Clarke. (I had a flash of déjà vu when I read about that last one--wasn't there a Clarke retrospective at Carifesta 2006? And also at Carifesta 1995? Might there not be another Caribbean artist worth giving this honour to?)

- Patrick French, author of the new V.S. Naipaul biography The World Is What It Is, is in India, giving lots of interviews--to Monica Bathija, for the Times of India; G. Sampath, for DNA; and Mita Kapur, for The Hindu. From the DNA interview:

Before I took on this project, I knew him only slightly, had met him only a couple of times. He has a reputation as a villain, and so when I discovered the ways in which he'd behaved badly I wasn't particularly surprised. But having said that, when you consider the early period of his life, I found a lot of reasons to feel sympathetic towards him. The one thing that was a shock, was how tough his life had been in 1950s London. When he tried to get a job, he was told he had the wrong sort of face. Or when he tried to get accommodation, he couldn't get it. He didn't have enough money for food. The extent of that struggle, in 1950s London, was something he had never spoken about before, even though it was an experience similar to what millions of others went through. He's always separated himself from that and made out as of he won the scholarship to Oxford and thereafter made himself into a great writer. That struggle was quite a surprise to me.

A couple of reviews have also appeared in the Indian press, including one by Makarand Paranjape in India Today, and another by Rumina Sethi in The Hindu.

- And at the PEN American Centre blog, Marlon James reports on two more events at the World Voices festival, a panel discussion called Do You Believe? and another ("the bad boys panel") called Mean Streets.

A voice from PEN

Marlon James is at the PEN World Voices festival in New York; he reports at the PEN American Centre blog on two events he's attended. The first was a panel called Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Great Works (Charles Simic, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Fatou Diome, Ma Jian); the second was American Literature as Seen from Abroad (Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, Binyavanga Wainaina).

May 2008 Antilles book of the month: The Same Earth, by Kei Miller

In an average month, dozens of new Caribbean books arrive at the CRB office. Not all of them get reviewed in the magazine--too many books, not enough pages--and because we are a quarterly with a rather long lead time, sometimes months can pass between a book's arrival and its appearance in our pages.

Well, for better or worse, the WWW offers the possibility of near-instant gratification, so here is the first instalment in what I plan to make a regular feature on Antilles: our book of the month. Every month I'll choose from among the pile of newly arrived books one that seems worth recommending to Antilles readers. The choice will be entirely subjective, of course. Perhaps it will be a title I find intriguing for some reason, one that seems to offer important information or a compelling argument. Perhaps it will simply be a book that brings me pleasure. The first Antilles book of the month is in that latter category: Kei Miller's first novel, The Same Earth, published in March by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

From the publisher's website:

It all begins with the theft of Tessa Walcott's polkadot panties and a river that changes course overnight...

When Imelda Richardson leaves the small village of Watersgate, Jamaica, armed only with one small suitcase, she is doing so for the second time. One of the throng of young Jamaicans who left the island after the devastating hurricane of 1974, Imelda's journey has taken her to England, to the home of ganja-growing rebel Purletta Johnson, the arms of fake Northerner Ozzie, and a law degree. But when her mother dies Imelda returns to Watersgate, choosing Jamaica over England. 1983 is still a couple of years shy of the great dancehall explosion in which artistes like Shabba Ranks would sing how he 'loved punany bad', and the village is still dominated by the Evangelical church and the thundering voice of Pastor Braithwaite. When Tessa Walcott's panties are stolen -- and in the absence of Perry Mason -- she and Imelda decide to set up a Neighbourhood Watch. But they haven't counted on Pastor Braithwaite and the crusading zeal of Evangelist Millie. As a Pentecostal fervour sweeps through the village, the tensions between old and new come to a head.

(Miller is something of a favourite here at Antilles, as regular readers will know. Almost a year ago, we ran an interview with him; last July the CRB hosted him at a reading and public conversation in Port of Spain; and on that same visit to Trinidad, he recorded a podcast with CRB friend and contributor Georgia Popplewell. The CRB has published two of his poems in our May 2007 issue; his review of a book by James Berry in November 2007; and a review of his first two books by Edward Baugh in February 2007. The May 2008 CRB includes a review by Vahni Capildeo of Miller's second book of poems and the New Caribbean Poetry anthology he recently edited.)