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Literary Review
American dreams
GRANTA'S editors, struck by the vehemence of anti-American feeling after September 11, decided to set internationally renowned writers some homework. Each of them had to write a short piece conveying their sense of the Big Caring Democratic Brother.
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk evokes an ethos very like pre-liberalisation India, where the natives crave all the American goodies they have no access to: Coke cans, Chicklet, blue jeans. On the floor above Pamuk's boyhood home lives a lonely American boy who goes to his American school in an orange American bus. He plays by himself with hundreds of expensive ceramic marbles of a kind Pamuk and his Turkish friends can only yearn for. After much shouted entreaty the boy would appear and throw a few of his marbles down, "a cross and lonely king tossing gold pieces." At last comes a day when in silence they actually trade marbles and the boy tells them his name.
Our boys are in Granta as well: Pankaj Mishra has an essay on jihadis, for which he travelled through Pakistan and Afghanistan, interviewing dozens of people. Ramachandra Guha writes of the "deeply democratic and instinctively imperialist" nature of America. Amit Chaudhuri reveals an uncharacteristic flair for humour in a piece about growing up in Bombay "under the canopy of Brezhnev's enormous eyebrows" watching Sovexport films because "The cuts in Hollywood films were clumsily, even insultingly, made — a woman might be unbuttoning her blouse; she seemed to suffer a brief spasm or convulsion; then she was seen to be buttoning her blouse. We, in the Seventies, studied that spasm closely and hopelessly."
Granta 77, Granta Books, £5.99.
ANURADHA ROY
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