Set in the swinging London of the 1960s, Crump's Terms evokes that time of the exploding popular culture through the life of its remarkable hero. An English teacher at a London Secondary Modern school, Crump presides over a class of adolescents. In the course of his working day, his narrative is presented as a continuous stream of memories, associations and obsessive literary quotations that cut into the present with cinematic deftness. The nouvelle vague cinema, which was important in the 1960s, the burgeoning popular culture and Pop Art, the whole cultural environment of the time is the background of the novel in which Crump's narrative, often mimicking those styles, is created. Then there is the story of Crump's wife Frieda, a South African at the time of apartheid whose mother has defected to Communist East Germany and the story of her own apparent defection. But are these stories and Crump's apparent memories real or are they projections of scenarios in Crump's mind? Is he, tormented by the present, making up nouvelle vague and literary images to create a distracting fiction for himself? Is his whole life a fictive invention of his mind? Then there are his spontaneous lectures to his students uttered as an incisive commentary about the state of Europe; there is the philosophical underpinning-what it is all about; and there is Zulfikar Ghose's remarkable prose that is imagistic, witty, and original. This is a novel that produces the Nabokovian authentic vibrancy of sheer literary pleasure. It captures its time, the Sixties, and yet it is timeless.
About the Author: Zulfikar Ghose is internationally known as a critic, poet and novelist. His books include Jets from Orange, Figures of Enchantment and a trilogy, The Incredible Brazilian. His work has received praise from T. S. Eliot, Anthony Burgess, John Fowles and Michael Moorcock, amongst others. Born in 1935 in Sialkot, Pakistan, Ghose emigrated to England in 1952. After graduating from Keele University with a BA in English and Philosophy, he lived in London where he was a cricket correspondent for The Observer and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and the Western Daily Press. In 1960, he met the novelist and poet B. S. Johnson, with whom he became close friends, and in the same year he joined The Group - a collection of poets who met at Edward Lucie-Smith's house in Chelsea to discuss their work. These meetings were attended by, amongst others, George MacBeth and Philip Hobsbaum, and occasionally by Ted Hughes. In 1963, Zulfikar Ghose was put forward for the E. C. Gregory Award by the judges T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Henry Moore and Howard Sergeant; but when Eliot fell ill, his place on the committee was taken by a solicitor who raised an objection concerning Ghose's nationality. The committee decided to overcome the legal hurdle by giving him a "Special Award". His works comprise books and poems published on both sides of the Atlantic and where his rich prose has been described as "remarkable, imagistic, witty and original" and all his writing "sheer literary pleasure, exciting, effective, evocative and the beauty of great art". In 1969, Ghose emigrated to the U.S.A after an invitation to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. He had tea with Patricia Nixon at the White House who presented him with a copy of The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. He became a US citizen in 2004 and went on to hold the distinguished position of Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing. Ghose, now retired from full-time teaching, is the Professor Emeritus, University Texas at Austin. He lives with his wife Helena de la Fontaine, an artist from Brazil, whom he married in London in 1964.