From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/29/99
Time: 9:28:08 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
[Poster's note: You're not gonna believe this one. Some anonymous mega-doofus wrote the following review of *Heavy Water* for a newspaper called *The Hindu*. Published in India. From July 27, 1999. I swear I'm not making this up. I found it in Lexis-Nexis.]
*FICTION IN MAULED ENGLISH* / BY ANONYMOUS
Taking liberties with the English language with a blatant disregard for the choice of words which do not find a place in any dictionary (examples of which are "constructivist" and "progeriac novelties") seems to have become the privilege of modern writers of the brand of fiction to which the book under review seems to belong. What the author has done at least with the last story in the collection, *What happened to me on holiday* [sic], is more than taking such liberties; it is an excess with mostly unintelligible communication by one who should have remained dumb instead of having been allowed to pelt us with gibberish like: "We grabbed zum lunj and then went oud to Lang Island in a big goach galled the Jidney. In the Jidney, yo veld you were in a blane, nad a buz: vree juize or Berrier, vree beanudz, individual zbadlighds do read by, and a lavadory in the bag." The purpose obviously is to give an illustration of how English is mauled by the illiterates of Britain and the U.S.
Some of the stories are straight pornography with nothing being left to the most prurient imagination. It will, however, be unfair to pick up [sic] the passages just mentioned to judge upon the writing of the author. Quite often it gets into a delightful spirit: "The coffee shop waiters and waitresses were actors and actresses and the people they served were all librettists and scenarists, harpists, pointillists, ceramicists, caricaturists, contrapuntalists." "And the sequence kept eluding him. The foot, the hand, the rung; the slip, the swing, the topple. It was the sequence, the order, that was always wrong; foot, slip, hand, swing, rung, topple." The redeeming factor of this collection is the rollicking humour of a few of them. The happenings in this collection of stories include ears "whistling like seashells". The behaviour of some of the characters is also a reflection of the boredom and the decay into which the younger people---and they include Indian and Pakistani immigrants---on either side of the Atlantic have sunk. Bouncing cheques are part of the picture while the four-letter word is often the only speech one hears most of the time.
One of the stories, *The Janitor on the Mars* [sic], is science fiction throwing some light---with the same obtuseness in which the author specialises---on what has made the humans on the Earth [sic] vulnerable. "The other thing that slowed you down" says a Martian, "was the unique diffuseness of your emotional range. Tender feelings for each other, and for children and even animals." Does tenderness retard survival of the fittest? These are the few purple patches in an otherwise tiring collection.