"In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it." -T. S. Eliot
"Bless him, [Desani] does mash it up, bending orthography, stretching syntax, mixing in shards of Hindi, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German and a goodly dose of balderdash, whilst tossing in references to Whitman, Shakespeare, Socrates, Freud and appeals to Kama and Laxmi as well as to Allah and Christ. Only a quasi-outsider (an Irishman, say) could have such an irreverent ear for the Anglo-Saxon tongue. But
Hatterr is more readable by miles than
Finnegans Wake, and a lot more fun." -Ben Ehrenreich,
Los Angeles Times "A mischievous mulligatawny that reads like a collaboration between Mrs. Malaprop and Groucho Marx...At the end you may not quite know where you've been, but you understand you've had a helluva trip." -
Newsweek "A bizarre and delightful voice...to paraphrase would be travesty." -
Time "The instrument of subservience became a weapon of liberation. It was the first great stroke of the decolonizing pen." -Salman Rushdie
"Eclectic, nourishing, do-it-yourself subcontinental stew." -Githa Hariharan
"Now...you can marvel at one of the great verbal extravaganzas in the English (more or less) language." -
The Nation "A rewarding feast of fish and fowl, fiction and philosophy, hilarity and hope." -
The New York Times "One doesn't explain a work like this, or attempt to describe it. You simply let the language flow like the lyrics of a Calypso song, or a subdued show of stroboscopic lights." -
The San Francisco Chronicle "Mr. Desani is a writer of great originality, who is making a contribution...all his own." -C. P. Snow
"Desani is undoubtedly a master in the creative use of English-puns, parodies, colloquialisms-and an accomplished artist in the invention of a new language." -
World Literature Today "Challenging, stimulating, and thoroughly delightful." -
Austin-American Statesman A "linguistic groundbreaker" -
The Guardian (UK)
"G. V. Desani - whose brilliant 1940s shaggy-dog novel
All About H Hatterr inspired
Midnight's Children - what enchants, is a 'rigmarole English', as Hatterr would say, all its own." -
The Guardian (UK)
"A comic masterpiece...This books is one of the funniest I have read for many years...Desani's verbal invention is indefatigable, his linguistic sources inexhaustible."-Philip Toynbee,
The Observer (UK)
