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Art may be long and life short, as the adage goes, but not for the aged New Delhi writer at the center of this compassionate comic novel. Nur, the greatest poet of the dying Urdu language, has outlived his gift--his last poems are 15 years behind him--but not his rather tattered legend. Half blind, often drunk, he plays up to the bohemian rabble who hang around him, endures the squabbling of his two wives and waits, if not for death, then for some form of deliverance. Enter Deven, a poetry-smitten young lecturer from a provincial college. Assigned to tape the master's verse and reminiscences for a literary magazine, Deven presents himself as a fervent, though hopelessly ineffectual, acolyte.
The encounter at first yields melancholy farce, richly rendered by Delhi- based Novelist Anita Desai (this is the India you missed while watching The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India). The naive Deven seems no match for Nur, but the situation pivots on the question of who, finally, is in custody to whom. Nur begins urgently pressing his needs upon Deven--money, medical care, the education of a son. Frantic, Deven asks himself, "In taking Nur's art into his hands, did he have to gather up the stained, soiled, discoloured and odorous rags of his life as well?" The answer, Desai makes clear, is yes, and the way Deven responds to this crushing truth is both plausibly surprising and stirring.
SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS
by Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin; 365 pages; $18.95
Once, when Paul Theroux was living in Indonesia "among some of the poorest people I have ever seen in my life," he was commissioned to review John Updike's Rabbit Redux. The novel's account of suburban problems seemed remote and trivial: "To say that I took a dim view of Rabbit is an understatement," he recalls in the introduction to this sprightly roundup of fugitive pieces. The "far too cruel" review shows the writer's patented amalgam of myopia, crankiness and readability.
It must be said that Theroux is just as hard on himself as he is on his competitors--and the world around him. He has left the pieces in chronological order from 1964 to 1984, creating a portrait of a writer growing up, sharing first his wonderment that it can get terribly cold in Africa, and learning at last that he cannot outrow the currents of Nantucket Sound in a tiny skiff. The journeys are inside and out: reflecting on his own unscholarly past at a high school reunion; fleeing a New England hurricane by taking a train halfway around the U.S. He does not flinch from strong opinions: Hemingway is "a destroyer"; high school sports are "a drug far worse than marijuana." Kipling, he acknowledges, believed "in the salvation of imperialism, and any number of his stories and poems indicate his hatred for certain races or groups of people." Yet Theroux finds him irresistible.
He exhorts a traveling companion in Africa to forsake the camera for the eye, but in two other essays lauds photography both for its depth of realistic detail and its ability to create exotic illusions. In this book, Theroux serves as both the camera and the eye, and both the detail and the illusions are developed with brilliance.
HER FIRST AMERICAN
by Lore Segal
Knopf; 287 pages; $15.95