Monday Books has posted another excerpt from Second Opinion on their blog.
I think most Dalrymple readers will find this one of his most enjoyable books, focusing as it does on the hilarious dialogue with his patients that so enlivens some of his more serious-minded essays. Buy it here and get free shipping worldwide.
You’ll know by the first paragraph that you are going to enjoy Monday Books‘ new excerpt from Second Opinion:
IT IS IN LISTENING to other people talk that you learn to appreciate silence. What higher praise of a man could there be than that he is taciturn? People have only to talk for a short time for it to become obvious that the greatest of human rights is not freedom of opinion, but freedom from opinion. It is a mercy that there are so many languages that one does not understand.
Monday Books has published a new excerpt from their wonderful Dalrymple collection “Second Opinion”. The leavening humor in this book makes it an extremely enjoyable read for Dalrymple devotees accustomed to his usual, more serious take on British slum culture:
WHY THE BRITISH want to reproduce themselves is a question which isas puzzling in its own way as that of the origin of life.
Their existence is so wretched, so utterly lacking in anythingreasonably resembling a purpose, so devoid of those things that makehuman life worthwhile (I am merely paraphrasing what thousands have toldme) that it is a marvel that they should go in for children.
I suppose the nearest I can come to an explanation is that they hope achild will supply the want that they feel: the triumph of hope overexperience, for they soon discover that a British child merely addschores to emptiness.
Dalrymple’s forthcoming “satire on the health-and-safety culture” is now available for order at Monday Books. It ships within the next couple of weeks. You can order it here.
His 1995 satire So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer is appended to the book, and with such a reasonable price, readers get quite a good deal. So Little Done is especially popular in the Netherlands, where it was made into a one-man play last year. If The Examined Life is as similar as it appears to be, it should get its point across in a very humorous way.
Monday Books had also planned an August release for Anything Goes, his first-ever collection of entirely new essays, but that has been pushed back to early next year.
Several people have asked about or mentioned Dalrymple’s new book Spoilt Rotten. I don’t have a copy yet myself, so I can’t say much about it. I have heard from its publisher, Gibson Square Books, and it appears the book is now available but only in the UK. I ordered a copy via Amazon.com (the American site) through a reseller. Commenter Rachel says here that she bought it from Amazon UK and had it shipped to Israel, so you should be able to get it that way as well.
When the book first appeared on Amazon UK a few weeks ago, its subtitle was “How Britain is Ruined by Its Children”, but it has changed to “The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality”, suggesting that the book makes a wider argument about society as a whole and not just the unique problems caused by modern child-rearing. I know that two years ago Dalrymple was working on a book on sentimentality, so it appears this is that book.
Some people hate the cover, but I find it hilarious.
On the way from Antigua to Escuintla, along an unmade road of surpassing beauty, I gave a lift to a schoolteacher on her way home. For something to say, I mentioned that I had interviewed General Rios Montt.
“A terrible man,” she said shaking her head vehemently.
“Why do you say so?” I asked.
“When he was president,” she said, “he ordered all the teachers in the department of Escuintla to attend a meeting with him in a cinema in the city. There were five hundred of us.” She was almost choking with rage at the recollection of it. “Do you know what he did?”
“No,” I said.
“He told one of the teachers to put out his cigarette.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“Is that any way to speak to professionals?”
“No,” I said, feigning shock.
“Then he said that the teachers were not doing their work properly. He called us lazy. Is that any way to speak to professionals?”
If they are lazy, I thought.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
There was a pause in the conversation as I drove over some ruts in the road. The teacher was still raging at the recollection of the humiliation.
“But some people say,” I resumed, “that when Rios Montt came to power things got much better. They say there was less killing.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Before Rios Montt we used to see trucks go by with bodies when we stood by the road waiting for a lift. Then, after his coup – no more.”
I looked at her as I drove. It was a dangerous thing to do but I wanted to see whether she was serious. She was, and so I concluded that the episode with the cigarette weighed more with her than the disappearance of trucks laden with bodies. It was a curious scale of values, and one that helps explain the appearance of the trucks in the first place.
The eminent David Pryce-Jones has a brief review of Dalrymple’s next book “The New Vichy Syndrome” on his blog at National Review Online, saying at one point:
There’s no one quite like him. He’s been a doctor and worked in prisons, really coming to grips with the lower depths. Although he reports terrible things, and sometimes has a little gleam of I-told-you-so when reporting something even more terrible than what’s gone before, he refuses to abandon his humane instincts and a belief that it’s worth fighting for civilization even if the cause looks lost.
As admirers of the writing and intellect of Dr. Anthony Daniels aka Theodore Dalrymple, we pride ourselves on our knowledge of the man’s work. So imagine our surprise, to say nothing of the blow to our egos, when we discovered a book, written by him over twenty years ago, that was formerly completely unknown to us. In 1989, Daniels published a satire called Filosofa’s Republic under the name Thursday Msigwa, described on the book jacket as “the pen-name of who says in a letter to the publisher that ‘biographical details interfere with the proper estimate of an author’s work,’ and added that disclosure was in any case impolitic for him in his present country of residence.” Yes, that is a blank where the name “Anthony Daniels” should be. At the time of the book’s publication, Daniels was still covering African politics for the Spectator under another pseudonym, Edward Theberton, and all of this mystery was necessitated by Daniels’ criticisms, both in this book and in the Spectator, of African political leaders who did not receive criticism warmly.
The “filosofa” in question here is “His Excellency The Brother-President of The United Democratic Human Mutualist Republic of Ngombia Filosofa Dr. Cicero B. Nyayaya”, clearly a satire on Julius Nyerere, the President of Tanzania during much of the time that Daniels lived there and who referred to himself as mwalimu or teacher. Where Nyerere had his Arusha Declaration, Nyayaya has his Harisha Declaration. Like Nyerere, Filosofa implements a rigid political structure designed to provide control at the most granular level possible. He calls it “The Law of Eights”, and it requires that “every eighth household should be represented [meaning, monitored] by a Party member”, eight of whom report to a higher-ranking Party member, and so on. Also like Nyerere, Filosofa promotes a political theory (“Human Mutualism”) that, while claiming to be “neither communist nor anticommunist, but simply the expression in the African context of the highest ideals of Man”, nevertheless embraces all the hallmarks of communism: collectivized farming, forced equality and one-party rule.
If the internal contradictions inherent in Filosofa’s ridiculously long title haven’t already betrayed any claim of devotion to equality, then surely the nature of his political hierarchy does so. But while Filosofa’s politics might suggest menace and hardship, what actually results is irrelevance and futility. Daniels divides the book into chapters that begin with one of Filosofa’s maxims and end with a vignette from daily life in fictional Ngombia (based on Daniels’ own experiences in Tanzania) that shows that maxim to be completely ineffectual against the tide of local culture. Filosofa’s promises of justice are juxtaposed with scenes of backroom judicial corruption, and his calls for “a new kind of Man” are shown to be helpless against normal human vice. But Daniels isn’t criticising communism alone. He also demonstrates the inability of religious missionaries (both African and European) to change people’s behavior, and he therefore seems to suggest that foreign ideas of all kinds find it hard to take root in African soil.
His argument is serious, but his heart is light. Daniels clearly has great fondness for the people he met in Africa and enjoys telling these stories. Although this is officially a work of fictional storytelling (his only one), it reads much like his travel books, and to an avid reader of his work, Anthony Daniels the sincere travel writer sometimes seems to poke through the satire. This complicates the work’s already complex provenance. The story is told in the first-person by a narrator who is a white, English accountant, but Daniels chose an African pseudonym. The book jacket says “Thursday Msigwa… [writes] through the eyes of a white visitor to Ngombia”, so is Anthony Daniels writing as an African who is writing a fictional satire as a white Englishman?
It doesn’t matter. The characters are too likeable, the stories too charming and the point made too well for the reader to care.