THE MAN WHO SURVIVED THE BONFIRE Book Review dated Friday, August 15, 2008 from http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080815/jsp/opinion/story_9678480.jsp# --- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar ''The Collector of Worlds'' By Iliya Troyanov, Faber, Rs 495 Snippets from the review -- Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-90), British soldier, explorer, fencer, spy, polyglot, translator, ethnologist and writer could be considered a Ulysses incarnate, albeit sans the pomposity and smugness of the hero of Tennyson's poem. Posted to India in the service of the East India Company, Burton started his career as an officer in the lowest rank and then got himself expelled for writing a report on the homosexual brothels of Karachi that suggested that the writer had known the inmates in the Biblical sense. As his fellow countrymen in the most lucrative colony of the Empire either made inveterate villains of the natives or through "soft degrees/ Subdue[d] them to the useful and the good", Burton sought to become one of them. And this he did primarily by learning their languages. So started a lifetime of shape-shifting in which Burton's main tool would be his command over the idiom of the 'other'. He eventually mastered about 25 languages, besides numerous dialects. While the details of Burton's life - his unquenchable thirst for explorations, of countries and bodies, interest in the religions and literature of the Orient and life-long addiction to opium - consist the stuff that legends are made of, the man himself remains an enigma. Iliya Troyanov makes it clear at the outset that he does not aim to write Burton's biography. His novel "is intended as a personal approach to a mystery rather than as an attempt at definite revelation", he says. In effect, The Collector of Worlds is as much about Burton as about the people whose identities he tried to take on. Since The Collector of Worlds is a translation of the German Der Weltensammler, it is difficult to know whether the occasional oddities are in keeping with the illiterate natives' speech habits or if they have been introduced by the translator, William Hobson. Phrases like "your warm-hearted and compassionate feeling's hand" or "Leave it be" can be baffling if they are not accepted as deliberate on the part of the author. =================================