Amit Chaudhuri
James Kelman's A Disaffection (Seeker, £11.95, Picador, £6.99) is the best novel I have read recently. Kelman uses pidgin Glaswegian to evoke the deluded, selfish, and extremely tender nature of the human consciousness, and the orphaned, awkward state of the adult human body, trying still to cope with daily changes in temperature and the lack of contact with other bodies. It is an evocation of a way of feeling pleasure and pain, both physical and emotional, that was once supposed to be universal, but is actually remarkably contingent and will probably soon disappear from the world of late capitalism, only persisting, a little longer, in cities like Glasgow or Calcutta. Thus, for all his use of the f — word (which, it should be noted, he never uses in its real sense), I find in Kelman the residue of an old-style faith, a 'crazy sort of nostal- gia'. Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory (Versa, £34.95, £12.95) is a most impressive, exculpatorY, book of essays which raises necessary ques- tions about the idea of contemporary 'third world' literatures, as understood in the West: whether such an entity as the typical 'third world' nation actually exists, whether it lends itself, thus, to representation by some contemporary novelists, and whether these novelists, although writing in a politi- cised way, are not actually depoliticising their fiction by assuming the existence of such inert conceptual entities as their basis. It is a work of sustained intelligence and eloquence.
To be continued next week
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