Perhaps one of the chief pleasures of reading literature is the chance of discovery it still offers. Although it might not always be possible to share the young Keats’s sense of profound wonder at having found Chapman and his Homer, the world of literature yet affords minor miracles. These might take the form of authors you’ve never heard of but whose writings suddenly surprise you with their brilliance. Aubrey Menen proved to be one such. His novels, with their keen wit, irreverence and humour, have been a discovery for me. I now wish I knew more about their author regarding whom I can retrieve so little information from the available sources.
Notwithstanding the foreign-sounding name, Salvator Aubrey Clarence Menen was half-Indian, his father being a high-caste Hindu from Malabar married to an Irishwoman. He was born in 1912 in London, attended University College in that city, worked for the Indian government during the Second World War, returned to London when the war ended, and died in Thiruvananthapuram in 1989. Summing up his life spent shuttling between two countries and cultures, Menen’s obituary in The New York Times (February 23, 1989) described him as the “Indian Critic, Novelist and Essayist from Britain”.
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