Where Kipling Left Off

ALL ABOUT H. HATTERR (300 pp.)--G. V. Desani--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

G. V. (for Govindas Vishnoodas) Desani is a clever young Hindu intoxicated with Shakespeare, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley and words in general. His first novel, All About H. Hatterr, is an extended verbal jag that has already set London highbrows searching vainly for similes. Said T. S. Eliot: "Certainly a remarkable book. In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it."

A onetime Reuters and A.P. correspondent in India who now lives in England, Novelist Desani knows the pomposities of East and West, spoofs both with the irreverence of a classroom cutup tossing spitballs at the teacher. The most stinging hits are reserved for his credulous native India.

Swamis with Sidelines. H. Hatterr, Desani's comic hero, is a born stooge and fall guy. Born illegitimate, "a love-brat, a mixed Oriental-Occidental sinfant," Hero Hatterr endures a series of misadventures which keep him low man on life's totem pole.

Chronically strapped for cash, and married to a termagant wife, he takes any job that comes along. His first is reporter for an Indian "extreme-wing" publication. Sent to interview a swami called the "Sage of the Wilderness," he quickly falls under the old chap's spell. "Please, master," he asks, "utter a few words of wisdom and . . . comfort the reading classes." But the swami's brand of wisdom is P. T. Barnum's. "Canst thou," he inquires soulfully, "spare me thy trousers, thy jacket, thy shirt, thy shoes, thy cufflinks, thy watch, every accessory thou hast on thy person?" Only too happy to oblige, Hatterr is sent packing back to town in a dirty towel and is promptly fired. He finds out later that the swami is working on the side for a secondhand clothing outfit.

Id & Libido. Hatterr decides to get into the swami racket himself. But just as he and his partner are about to put on their big show for the gullible, he learns what his own billing is to be: that of a saintly eunuch who has surgically rendered "his id and libido null and void." Much attached to his id and libido, Hatterr scoots off into the brush.

His yen for a circus impresario's wife gets him his strangest task. Thanks to her, he signs on as a lion tamer, finds that his job is to lie down with a beefsteak on his chest and let a lion eat the steak. A dress rehearsal and one performance cool his ardor for the impresario's wife. It turns out that the impresario uses her as a regular decoy to line up human steak platters. Between catastrophes, H. Hatterr asks himself the perennial questions of philosophy, some piffling, some reaching toward profundity: "Why is an evening paper published in the afternoon?" "Is there anything in this here 'Kismet' notion? If Destiny should commit a feller to the wrong woman, can anything prevent it happening?"

In his secular Pilgrim's Progress, Hero Hatterr loses his rupees but never his resilience. Totting up his experiences, he wryly invokes the code of the departed sahibs: "A sportsman, if at all genuine, never stops shooting . . . Carry on boys, and continue like hell!" Fun in some spots, frantic in others, flat in a few, All About H. Hatterr takes up where Kipling left off. But Kipling would hardly know the old locale when Desani gets through with it.

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