Copyright 1990 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

June 7, 1990

LENGTH: 810 words

HEADLINE: Books: Paperbacks

BYLINE: By AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

Granta 31: The General, edited by Bill Buford (Granta Publications/Penguin, Pounds 5.99) The Heretic by Chris Scott (Quartet, Pounds 6.95) The Best Of Ognonyok The New Journalism Of Glasnost, edited by Vitaly Korotich and Cathy Porter (Heinemann, Pounds 9.95) Unnatural Selection, by Daniel Evan Weiss (Black Swan, Pounds 4.99) Arguments For A Theatre, by Howard Barker (John Calder, Pounds 3.95) Essays On Politics And Literature, by Bernard Crick (Edinburgh University Press, Pounds 8.95)

GRANTA HAS tended to show up the mediocrity of many English writers and their publishers against a backdrop of brilliant contemporary writing from around the world. The latest issue, after a frustrating interview with the deposed President of Paraguay, the longest-serving dictator in the Western hemisphere, moves on to an illuminating if overshort view of Colombia from Marquez. After his soapy Love In The Time Of Cholera it's refreshing to read him on the tragedy of a US-sabotaged peace plan involving the Medellin drugs cartel and the Colombian government.

Then come three pieces from one of the most visible, or perhaps invisible, defenders of liberty at the moment. After Rushdie's dazzling defence of the written word in Is Nothing Sacred? he says in an interview that with writers beginning to rule countries perhaps the world is a less hopeless place than he thought it was. After Rushdie's second published poem, almost pastoral in tone, Buford serves up moving writings from Christopher Hitchens on the Timisoara Massacre and Richard Ford urbanely painting American provinciality.

The quasi-religious defence of 'the world' by Rushdie is echoed in The Heretic by Chris Scott. It's set in the late Rennaisance, the period when Ficino and the Platonic Academy espoused the divinity of 'the world,' as demonstrated in Genesis when pure Adam named the beasts of the earth. The interrogation of the book's tragic hero, Giordano Bruno, is juggled from different points of view, even if it's sometimes written in a hilariously extravagant style. Though it occasionally settles down, the book is flawed. Scott over emphasises Bruno's fervour for a Copernican universe as a reason for his trial and execution. As Dame Frances Yates has shown, what really sent him to burn at the stake was his belief that Christianity was a corruption of an ancient, hermetic Religion of the World.

Assuming Soviet c ommunism is a corruption on the same scale, it is disquieting to read The New Journalism Of Glasnost. If this collection represents the work of the heirs to Dostoevsky one can only weep for, in most cases, their second rate observations. I suspect that this is something of a Time magazine view of Soviet journalism. One article only is revealing: a father is unable to explain the exhortation 'Proletarians of the World Unite!' to his son. 'Who are the proletarians?' the son asks, unwittingly implying at a stroke the partial success of the Revolution.

The leftwinger in Unnatural Selection is Rosa Luxembourg, a cockroach named after the subject of a book she ate through in her larval stage. In this Kafkaesque farce, Numbers, the narrator, and his friends are all cockroaches. Numbers read The Iliad as an infant. Others weren't so lucky: 'We held an annual commemoration for the many lost in Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegans Wake.' These well-educated insects negotiate a host of dangers as they anxiously observe the humans that also inhabit their New York apartment. The chapter entitled The Assassination of Rosa Luxembourg chronicles the swallowing of Rosa by Ira, the human owner of the apartment. The story of how the community scotch Ira's romance with a fastidious woman is daring, readable and funny. The dustjacket states that the book was considered too controversial to publish in the US.

The controversiality, intelligence and sparkling clarity of Howard Barker's Arguments For A Theatre is startling. His is a theatre of responsible surrealism, that Art should not be digestible but rather act as 'an irritant in consciousness, like the grain of sand in the oysters gut.' This short book begins with the assumption that as we live the extinction of 'official socialism,' the opposition must take root in art. It ends with the observation that the greatest plays wound rather than reward, that in a world run by a necessity for its moral and emotional survival, it will endure the wound as a man drawn from a swamp endures the pain of the rope.

Bernard Crick dismisses Howard Barker as a 'conceited demagogue,' commenting on one of his plays: 'Even in adolescent religious days I was bored by sermons . . . and rationally puzzled about why all this incitement to a change of life should be aimed at those already converted.' This is a collection with few genuine insights, often ones to just lazily agree with.