Gehenna

Walter Kendrick

• The Brothers Singer by Clive Sinclair
  Allison and Busby, 176 pp, £8.95, April 1983, ISBN 0 85031 275 2
• The Penitent by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Joseph Singer
  Cape, 170 pp, £7.95, March 1984, ISBN 0 224 02192 3

When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, not everyone was gratified. Clive Sinclair begins The Brothers Singer with a quotation from a BBC radio interview broadcast minutes after the award had been announced: the ‘astounded’ interviewer suspected that ‘some kind of American Mafia’ was at work in the Nobel Committee, while the ‘serious’ Professor Bradbury, discounting this theory, ascribed Singer’s triumph to ‘the domination of American writing in the world today’. Neither seemed to feel that Singer’s work, in its own right, deserved such an honour: both, in fact, appeared rather vague as to what sort of work the new laureate had done.