Lee Langley

Christine Brooke-Rose is not an easy read. She is a sublime roller- coaster: hold on and hurtle with her — the ride will be exhilarating. She is dark, despairing, but her bleakness is Beckettian, the laughs never far away. Now 83, she lives in France, near Avignon. Born in Geneva (British father), she has written 12 novels (four of which are collected in the Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus), worked as a critic and academic, teaching English language and literature in Paris, been claimed by the French as a nouveau-romancier, a membership she rejects like all other memberships. Perhaps her staunch stand-alone path has led to her status as both eminent and little known.

This is a French novel, a very French novel. The author won the Prix Goncourt for an earlier book and this one carries hints of Voltaire and Sartre. The publishers suggest that Piano can be read as a metaphor of life and death, heaven and hell; Dante is invoked. Daunting stuff, you might think. A thin book, it comes wrapped in heavyweight literary packaging — in France Jean Echenoz is rated alongside Beckett and Nabokov. But what lies inside this intellectual bombe surprise is a sharp, airy sorbet that slips down with great ease: an existential thriller of the sort that might once have been turned into a movie by Jean Cocteau. It’s a deadpan, elegant and wittily observed tragicomedy: posh French fun.

Reading Maharanis has something of the poignant pleasure of rummaging in the attic of a great house fallen into desuetude: here are reminders of another age. Princesses stroll in their gardens in the Indian moonlight, fireflies flickering like stars, or roller-skate gaily through their marble palaces, saris billowing, with a staff of 400 to keep the place in order. We share the sense of loss Browning discerned in a Venice deprived of splendour ‘when the kissing had to stop’. Think of them dressing for dinner on a tiger hunt in the jungle (white tie and tails, evening gowns and emeralds) while a 35-piece band played in the dining tent. Back at the palace, guests chose their preferred mode of transport for the following day: ‘horse, elephant or Rolls-Royce’.

In his History of the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott described the bafflement of the Spanish arriving in a country where savagery and sweetness, blood sacrifice and delicate manners co-existed unsettlingly. In Mexico nothing was straightforward. Anita Desai is known, and acclaimed, for her novels about India. The sub- continent is her birthplace and literary territory. Setting her latest novel in Mexico, she writes with a visitor’s eye about a visitor, Eric, a nice, unmotivated post-graduate student at a loose end, who stumbles into a quest for his roots. For the quiet Bostonian, the shock of Mexico is visceral, overwhelming.

The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’ My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on a theme of displacement, the search for love, and the often painful gaining of knowledge. The possible lives are turbulent, though the narrator, a trusting girl who gives more than she gets, is invariably passive, and willingly exploited.

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first volume of short stories. The Namesake is her first novel, graceful, funny and sad, its theme dislocation and the pain of building a new life in a different world. In building that new life, something must also be destroyed. After an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli leave Calcutta to settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When, some years later, they take the family to India for a holiday, the couple sink happily into the old culture, but for their children, born in the US, America is home: they yearn for hamburgers and pepperoni pizza. Bengalis, the author tells us, are given two names: a pet name to be used by family and friends and a ‘proper’ name for outside use.

There was a time when our man at the BBC was the most famous foreign correspondent in India, his broadcasts reaching one fifth of the world's population. Road-blocks and armed insurgents tended to melt when confronted by Tully-sahib, the man to trust, who understood the problems. For 30 years he trawled the sub-continent, covering its social, political, personal and religious upheavals, but his career with the BBC ended in 1994 after a doomed attempt to point out to John Birt, in a public forum, the error of his broadcasting ways. There have been many journeys in Mark Tully's life, the first from India, where he was born in 1936, going 'home' at ten to a dark, chilly England which he didn't much like after India's warmth and colour.