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 10 Stars
Easily the best Indian novel written. And I think Midnight's Children is outstanding. But Hatterr is way ahead of everything else in style.
STOP!
Stop whatever you are doing, whatever you are reading and whatever you are watching and make time for this book. Once you read Hatter your literary life will be easily divided into two parts: Pre-Hatterr and Post Hatter.
 Spectacular.
'All about H Hatterr' is an achievement non-pareil (and I'm not only considering Indian-born writers here). This novel captures the adventures of a certain H Hatterr, an Anglo-Indian never-do-good fellow, amongst the seven sages. He gets into all kinds of trouble, always to be bailed out by his devoted friend Bannerji and 'that gem of a lawyer', Y Beliram. Trying to summarise the story would be a gross unjustice to the book, which is superb in content but absolutely brilliant in form. The style, scathingly original, is at times slightly tough to grasp (reminds one of Ulysses and the good old Joyce). Not a very light read, but really enjoyable.
and I am continuing...
This is a book whose content and literary importance are nearly inseperable. "The first great stroke of the decolonizing pen," Salman Rushdie (merely one in the great line of authors that Desani made available to themselves and the world) rightly called it. The book's language is its most interesting characteristic: "Hinglish" it has come to be called, proper English Hinduized and thereby made its authors own. The plot itself, while intriguing and playful, does not carry the reader along or provide enough substance to make this book great; the wonderful twists and turns of language and plot that we've come to associate with Indian literature in English is seen here only in germ form. Still, to miss this is to miss a revolution. Its out of print, but hopefully that will change; check the libraries in the meantime, and start a petition for a reprinting or something.
Ooooohhh so cooool!
Salman Rushdie, in his collection of essays "Imaginary Homelands", acknowledges a longstanding debt to G.V.Desani. He paraphrases Desani's H.Hatterr talking about the migration of the fifties and the sixties. "We are. We are here", he says, speaking for Indian writers in England. Rushdie's own prose owes much to Desani, and Saleem Sinai to Hatterr. Desani's prose is rollicking, hilarious, wildly creative and even boisterous, in this book that was written in wartime and published in postwar England, over a decade after R.K.Narayan's gentle little "Swami and Friends". Allan Sealy and, of course, Salman Rushdie are probably the best-known inheritors of the Desani mantle, having learned many tricks of their trade from him. But Desani himself has been sadly underrated for all these years, and, with the book not readily available, one has to hunt for his book in the King's Circle and Churchgate used-book markets of Bombay. Never fear, I discovered my copy there, and so might you. And in doing so, you might, as I did, discover Desani too.
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