- Paperback: 544 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; illustrated edition edition (1 Nov 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006532144
- ISBN-13: 978-0006532149
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 3.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 526,037 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
'A spectacular, stimulating work, full of intriguing information.' Sunday Times 'This cocktail of literary archaeology, social critique and storytelling reopens a window on a marginalised world.' Observer 'A fine, unusually insightful and stylishly written piece of work, a valuable, zesty contribution to the growing body of literature on black writers by black writers.' Daily Telegraph
The Sunday Times
'The material is so rich, and Sandhu so lively a writer … a
spectacular, stimulating work'
spectacular, stimulating work'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Answering the call,
By waduh (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Hardcover)
Tolerant, playful, learned, London Calling vividly repopulates London with the voices of black and Asian writers who have lived there over the last three hundred years. Sandhu delights in the sheer variety of ways in which these writers have imagined the city, in all its gloss and squalor. From the 18th century, where Ignatius Sancho runs a grocers shop, and sends out a stream of lively gossipy letters to his many cultured friends such as the author Laurence Sterne; to the twentieth, where Samuel Selvon pens novels which use modernist techniques to capture and build on the vibrant speech rhythms and shifting life experiences of Caribbean migrants, Sandhu prizes those writers who have immersed themselves in the messiness and chaos of the metropolis. He prefers writers like Hanif Kureishi or Salman Rushdie, whose characters exploit city life to break down barriers and fashion themselves anew, provide sardonic comment on London through their wild antics, and challenge a narrowly linear form of writing. V.S. Naipaul, despite acknowledged literary triumphs in other works, is seen to 'step back prudishly' from London, and to criticise the city like a dreary 'pub bore'.For Sandhu, black writing has been too often seen by its critics and even its supporters as 'emergency literature',in which the only value is journalistic reportage, or political agitation. He shows how black writers display a much wider range, indulging their imaginations, creating lasting literary achievements, mixing pleasure with a sense of the hardships which they faced. His writing is itself both colloquial and intense, rich in a diction rendering the heaped-up mixture and the snappiness he loves so much in those he studies. Sandhu does not entirely convince in one assertion, that 'London has been good for those coming from the old Empire'. Too many slave traders, antagonistic London mobs, racist landlords, crumbling rooms and vicious slurs lurk in the texts he examines to allow him to claim this. However, in bringing to prominence the long history of black and Asian inhabitants of London, Sandhu's service is not only literary. Without hectoring,he shows the good, bad and ugly sides of life as they experience it down the years; and the good, bad and colourful characters among them, from dedicated fighters against slavery, through criminal enforcers, to real and fictional chancers and tricksters whose scams and hopes for a better future are morally ambivalent. In all, the book is a stunning debut, one in which Sandhu demonstrates both the verbal energy and the generosity of moral vision which he charts in his favourite authors.
5.0 out of 5 stars
london calling how black and asian writers imagined a city,
This review is from: London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Paperback)
Brilliant concept- fills a gap - and very well executed. Excellent introduction to the lives and writing of black and asian writers in London from 17th century to the present day - how the city affected them and how their response affected British writing, culture, and identity.
12 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A major disappointment,
By A Customer
This review is from: London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Hardcover)
Considering the topic and the quality of the material at his disposal, this is a really disappointing book. This is mainly because Sandhu doesn't quite know what book he should be writing -- lit. crit. or history? -- so we get a bit of both but not much of either. Despite the book's hefty size it's very lightweight. It's meant to be about 'black and Asian writers', yet the early chapters are more like historical anecdotes and tell us how black people were written about in the 18th and 19th centuries but not really how they wrote (about) themselves. Little information is new. And when he does get down to some literary analysis it's pretty uninspiring: his take on Ignatious Sancho makes loads from, er, the dashes in Sancho's prose style. The 20th-century chapters are a bit more exciting, partly because the literature about which he's writing is more dynamic, but even here there are loads of missed opportunities: his peculiar reading of Caryl Phillips is symptomatic. Basically, 'London Calling' is not in-depth enough to be history and not sharp enough to be good lit. crit. so it ends up falling between two stools. Its unimaginative title is typical of the rather derivative feel of the book. And, oddly, Sandhu claims that the writers he explores aren't well-known; but this just isn't true. Equiano, Sancho etc. are well-worn subjects, as are Selvon, Kureishi and Rushdie. There's little here that isn't in Peter Fryer's magisterial history of black Britain, 'Staying Power', or C. L. Innes's recent excellent book on black writing in Britain since the 18th century. I was really disappointed by this book and -- amazingly, considering the subject-matter -- often bored. A pity.
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