George Steiner’s des¬cription of Granta as ‘a maga¬zine absolutely charged with life and risk’ —quoted on the inside cover—certainly fits this special issue. Devoted to recent fiction, this volume brings together twenty young British writers (all below forty), some of whom are already quite well known (Martin Amis, Shiva Naipaul, Salman Rushdie), and quite a few others who ought to be. Six of these twenty writers are women, five are born outside Britain (Ghana, Nigeria, Japan, India, Trinidad), and almost all are products of British universities. Their work is represented either by ex¬tracts from their recent novels or by independent stories, the longest being a 47-page tale by Christopher Priest, and the shortest a two and a half page piece by Rushdie, the riddle-¬like quality of which may remind some Indian readers of the cryptic and circular short stories of Krishna Baldev Vaid. The book is enlivened by photographs of the authors and brief write-ups on them, giving us glimpses of their social background, whetting our extra-literary curiosity and making us wonder, among other things, why Martin Amis looks so much like Sunjay Dutt. Not all the pieces included here are fiction in the strict sense of the term. For example Julian Barnes’s piece ‘Emma Bovary’s Eyes’ is really a reflection on the limits of academic criticism. The narrat¬ing voice is that of a sixty-year-old retired doctor, a widow¬er who has developed a mania for Flaubert and an aver¬sion to critics.
Jan-Feb 1984, volume 8, No 4