Dalrymple in Standpoint magazine: “… thanks to my frequentation of second-hand bookshops, I have come to realise that nothing human is alien to me.”
In Pursuit of the Unknown
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Monthly Archives: March 2009
Dalrymple’s Travel Writing
Dalrymple is well known for his eloquent and meaningful essays, but the travel journals of his early writing career are not as familiar to most readers. In these books, a man of broad education goes curious and open-minded on journeys through places where difficulty and conflict raise the fundamental questions of human existence. Below, for example, are a few lines from Sweet Waist of America: Journeys Around Guatemala. How many travel books contain lines like these?
The wrecked cathedral, once grandiose rather than grand, now deconsecrated and deserted, looks out over wasteland in which graze zebu cattle. The whole enormous edifice, with its crumbled walls of reinforced cement painted to look like marble, seems to mock the vanity of Man’s aspirations. Why rebuild when everything is destined for decay? The grass which grows in the cracks in the floor and bends before the wind that gusts through the ruined church made me think of six words: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The detritus of sanctity lies everywhere, unclaimed…
The Greatest Torture
The new installment of Dalrymple’s column in the British Medical Journal discusses Jonathan Swift’s apparent affliction with Ménière’s disease. (Subscription required)
In Praise of Precision
In FrontPage Magazine, Dalrymple considers two errors in a recent edition of Le Monde:
An error of the second, altogether more insidious and serious kind crept (for such errors are of the creeping kind) into its reporting of the funeral of the late assassinated dictator of Guinea Bissau, Bernardo (‘Nino’) Viera. It was the more serious because it served to render serious thought difficult or impossible, and prevented, by verbal means, important questions of political philosophy from being even recognised, let alone actually asked. The power of a single word to achieve this end is astonishing.
Whistling in the Dark
Dalrymple reviews Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower in The Spectator:
The ironies of aid to Africa — the means by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries — are hinted at in the book, as are the deeply condescending attitudes upon which the supposed need for such aid is based. But the author is not sceptical enough to see the absurdity of aiming aid, as she suggests, at the police forces and judicial systems of the continent in order, supposedly, to bring about the rule of law under which economies can flourish.
Europe is a Riot
The American Conservative magazine is carrying a new Dalrymple article in their March 23 edition. Apparently (and contrary to what the website promises), the piece is currently only available online as a PDF file at the price of a magazine subscription, so for those interested, you might want to check your local newsstand or library.
Dalrymple argues in the article that, as economic conditions worsen and European nations and their citizens are driven to follow their own economic self-interest, fake pride in pan-European identity will collapse, and “ethnic and cultural strife, and radical xenophobia” — driven by socialism, which puts economic control in the hands of government and thus creates a zero-sum game of economic welfare between competing, often race-based, interest groups — will increase. “I have seen the future, and it’s riots,” Dalrymple concludes.
Elsewhere, Dalrymple has identified other contributing factors: the problem of immigration without assimilation that is brought on by multiculturalism, the entitlement mentality created by the regime of rights, and more generally the idea that unhappiness and imperfection is a function of unjust social forces rather than personal behavior — in other words, many of the key components of modern liberalism.
UPDATE: As onthow mentions in his comment, the article can be accessed here for free.
New information on forthcoming books
We wanted to make sure that everyone saw the comment left by Dan Collins of Monday Books regarding their plans for new Dalrymple releases over the next year or so.
We’re about to publish (in the UK) four (and possibly more) Theodore Dalrymple books.
The first, ‘Not With A Bang But A Whimper’, will be available in May (it contains some of the essays in the US edition of NWAB, some from ‘Our Culture, What’s Left Of It’, some from ‘Life At The Bottom’ and some new material.
Later in the year we will publish ‘Second Opinion’, a collection of some Spectator pieces written under that title and under ‘If Symptoms Persist’.
Next year we will publish ‘Anything Goes’ – a further collection of new material and other material previously published overseas.
Finally, we will publish two brief satires in one volume (one of these is his serial killer work, ‘So Little Done’, and the other a novella about the British health system.
best
Dan Collins
It will be interesting to see how they combine the essays from the three City Journal compilations into one book geared to the British market, and it’s great that some of that material is finally getting published in book form in the country that is its chief subject. Dalrymple is always shouting into the wind, culturally speaking, and I hope this book breaks through.
I am probably most excited about Second Opinion, as I believe his brief Spectator columns are some of his most clever and funniest work. The more I read the two If Symptoms Persist books, the more I appreciate their concise brilliance, and as those books are out-of-print, I look forward to that type of material receiving another chance.
And it goes without saying that I anxiously await the new material.
Inside stories
The prose of official government reports hasn’t always grated on the ear.
Progress, it goes without saying, is not entirely uniform. Indeed, retrogression sometimes occurs, for example in the style of official prose. Where now it employs neologisms, euphemisms, and acronyms to the point of incomprehensibility, it was once clear, vigorous, and even a model for aspiring writers. Of course, in those days its authors were not so ashamed of what they did that they had to disguise it by the use of opaque language; barbarous locutions conceal a bad conscience.
Can anyone conceive of reading a contemporary official report with pleasure in its literary qualities? Recently I read the Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Condition and Treatment of the Prisoners Confined in Birmingham Borough Prison, and the Conduct, Management and Discipline of the Said Prison, published in 1854, not only with interest but in pleasure at the vigour of the prose, written by the three commissioners, . . .
Weekly update to the BMJ column (purchase required)
By the way, I just remembered that the British Medical Journal provides an extract for all of Dalrymple’s essays, so we can start quoting them without feeling guilty for giving away material that requires purchase. This may help you decide if you want to pony up the money for the essay.
Too much information
Dalrymple’s new BMJ essay asks for fewer sordid details in biographies (membership required).
CLASSIC DALRYMPLE: The Perils of Activism: Ken Saro-Wiwa (2000)
Dalrymple’s New Criterion essay on his friendship with executed Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa is the final installment of our series of his classic writings on Africa. But we have by no means exhausted the list of his wonderful treatments of the continent. We highly recommend Zanzibar to Timbuktu, Monrovia, Mon Amour and especially Fool or Physician.
The New Criterion has graciously made this essay, normally viewable only with a subscription or by individual purchase, available for free. (Thank you, Gabbe!) We strongly suggest you subscribe to this enriching journal of culture and the arts. What an impressive publication.
Essay excerpt:
Saro-Wiwa was the best of company: anecdotes poured from him without cease. In his presence, it was impossible to feel anything other than that life was infinitely interesting, varied, and enjoyable. But in turning to practical politics, it seemed to me that he betrayed his own insight: for the singlemindedness of his mass movement represented an impoverishment rather than an enrichment of life. It also contradicted the message of his own first book, Sozaboy (Addison-Wesley, 1995), which is one of the great antiwar novels of the century, by which he would have been remembered even had he not met so dramatic and gruesome a death.