The newest excerpt from Second Opinion by Monday Books displays Dalrymple’s rage at Islamic misogyny.
Men Of No Talent
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There Is Only One Way To Escape British Squalor
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.
The Examined Life now available for order
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.
New book “Spoilt Rotten” now available for purchase
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.
The Road to Escuintla
From Sweet Waist of America: Journeys Around Guatemala, p. 142:
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.
Pryce-Jones on The New Vichy Syndrome
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.
Pryce-Jones has written about Dalrymple before, stating in a 2006 review of “Our Culture, What’s Left Of It” that “I have no hesitation mentioning [Dalrymple and Orwell] in the same breath.” I’ve always thought it interesting – heartening, I suppose – to hear this praise from a 70-something, Eton-educated member of British aristocracy, directed at the son of immigrants of humble circumstances.
The Man Who Was Thursday Msigwa
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.
New Dalrymple book: Profeten en Charlatans
Dalrymple has had a new collection of his essays published, this time in Dutch. Amsterdam-based publishing house Nieuw Amsterdam has published “Profeten en Charlatans: Hoe Schrijvers Ons de Wereld Laten Zien” [“Prophets and Charlatans: How Writers Show Us the World”], a collection of Dalrymple’s essays of literary criticism chosen and translated by Jabik Veenbaas. Editor Pieter de Bruijn Kops was kind enough to translate a description of the book for our readers:
Profeten en charlatans, Theodore Dalrymple’s 2009 Dutch language book publication for Amsterdam-based publishing house Nieuw Amsterdam, consists of a selection of 28 essays on literary subjects. They were chosen, translated and provided with an introductory essay by Dutch philosopher, author and translator Jabik Veenbaas. This introduction is titled ‘Theodore Dalrymple en het belang van de literatuur’ [‘Theodore Dalrymple and the importance of literature’]. In it, Veenbaas gives a brief and penetrating analysis of Dalrymple’s unique style and approach in writing about writers, books and the meaning of literature. The essays by Dalrymple have been chosen partly from The New Criterion, in which they were published during the years 1999-2008, partly from one of Dalrymple’s own collections of essays, Not with a Bang But a Whimper. The Politics and Culture of Decline (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2008). In the selected essays, Dalrymple discusses works by writers as diverse as, among others, Burgess, Chekov, Conan Doyle, Kahlil Gibran, Ibsen, Ionesco, Dr. Johnson, Jung, LaRochefoucauld, Kerouac, Somerset Maugham, Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Shakespeare, R.S. Thomas and Tolstoy.
As a collection of essays, Profeten en charlatans has as yet been published in the Dutch language only. All of the essays, except the translator’s introduction, had been published previously – in English that is.
The following essays had been published in The New Criterion, in 1999: ‘Gooseberries’ (‘Kruisbessen’); in 2000: ‘Reticence or insincerity, Rattigan or Pinter’ (‘Terughoudendheid of onoprechtheid, Rattigan of Pinter’), ‘The perils of activism: Ken Saro-Wiwa’ (‘De gevaren van het activisme: Ken Saro-Wiwa’) and ‘W. Somerset Maugham: the pleasures of a master’ (‘W. Somerset Maugham: de genoegens van de meester’); in 2001: ‘Discovering LaRochefoucauld’ (‘La Rochefoucauld ontdekken’); in 2002: ‘Arrested development’ (‘Een tot stilstand gekomen ontwikkeling’); in 2003: ‘Carl Jung: the Madame Blavatsky of psychotherapy’ (‘Carl Jung: de madame Blavatsky van de psychotherapie’); in 2004: ‘Mr. Hyde & the epidemiology of evil’ (‘Meneer Hyde en de epidemiologie van het kwaad’) and ‘Reflections on the oldest profession’ (‘Enige gedachten over het oudste beroep’); in 2005: ‘Chekov & Tolstoy’ (‘Tsjechov en Tolstoj’), ‘Desert-island reading’ (‘Lezen over onbewoonde eilanden’) and ‘Holmes & his commentators’ (‘Holmes en zijn commentatoren’); in 2006: ‘Out of the time machine’ (‘Uit de tijdmachine’) and ‘The enigmatic R.S. Thomas’ (‘De raadselachtige R.S. Thomas’); in 2007: ‘Pound’s depreciation’ (‘De devaluatie van Pound’), ‘Another side of Paradise’ (‘De achterkant van Paradise’), ‘The false prophet’ (‘De valse profeet’) and ‘Diagnosing Lear’ (‘Een diagnose voor Lear’); in 2008: ‘Ionesco & the limits of philosophy’ (‘Ionesco en de grenzen van de filosofie’) and ‘At the forest’s edge’ (‘Aan de rand van het woud’).
The following essays had been published in Not with a Bang But a Whimper (2008): ‘A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece’ (‘Een profetisch en gewelddadig meesterwerk’), ‘In the Asylum’ (‘In het gesticht’), ‘Ibsen and His Discontents’ (‘Het onbehagen van Ibsen’), ‘A Drinker of Infinity’ (‘Een drinker der oneindigheid’), ‘What the New Atheists Don’t See’ (‘Wat de nieuwe atheïsten niet begrijpen’), ‘The Marriage of Reason and Nightmare’ (‘De verbintenis van rede en nachtmerrie’), ‘The Terrorists Among Us’ (‘De terroristen onder ons’) and ‘What Makes Dr. Johnson Great?’ (‘Waarom is Dr. Johnson groot?’).
Second Opinion now available
Monday Books has just released Second Opinion, a collection of Theodore Dalrymple’s various columns at the Spectator between the years 1997 and 2009. The handsome hardcover book is available here directly from Monday Books for £14.99 with free shipping to any address in the world. The price is especially generous when you consider the book measures out at 321 pages.
Monday Books has posted an excerpt at their website, and if you’ve never read these pieces, I encourage you to give them a look. They are simultaneously some of the funniest, most entertaining, most heartbreaking and most profound pieces I’ve read.
I have received my copy and look forward to diving in. Even as someone who has already read most of these columns, I laughed audibly throughout the excerpt. Who can resist the following exchange between Dalrymple and a patient attacked by his girlfriend’s mother:
Monday Books has posted an excerpt at their website, and if you’ve never read these pieces, I encourage you to give them a look. They are simultaneously some of the funniest, most entertaining, most heartbreaking and most profound pieces I’ve read.
I have received my copy and look forward to diving in. Even as someone who has already read most of these columns, I laughed audibly throughout the excerpt. Who can resist the following exchange between Dalrymple and a patient attacked by his girlfriend’s mother:
“…did she attack you often?”Admirable restraint, really!
“Only when she was pissed off with me.”