I started reading this, kind of lazily skimming through it and didn't immediately realize it was a joke. Parts of it actually do sound like excerpted material from Hitch-22. For instance, it opens:
Before me is a photograph of Martin Amis, James Fenton and myself taken by the ravissante Angela in Paris 1979 and I am reminded of a letter I sent to Julian Barnes on the publication of Nothing to be Frightened Of, in which I congratulated him on his contrast – almost certainly unintentional – between Lucretius and Larkin.
Or this passage,
My time in the abattoir of scholarship that passed for Oxford in the 1960s was entirely frivolous. Isaiah Berlin was not as sharp as I had been led to believe and there was greater stimulation to be had discussing Marxist theory with the Cowley car workers – though I never got used to their proletarian way of calling me Chris rather than Christopher, so it was always a relief to dialectically return to college to guzzle a bottle of two of Château Margaux.
After Oxford, I visited Havana at the personal invitation of Castro. However, I found his conflation of Stalinism with Leninism simplistic, so I returned to Notting Hill, where I earned a few shillings from the New Statesman...
But there are a number of dead giveaway lines as well:
By the early 1980s I had grown tired of the self-satisfied London parochialism that refused to honour me as the greatest thinker of the Far Left, and moved – taking only my first editions of Proust and Rosa Luxemburg – to New York, where I quickly became America's lone moral force against the crass relativism of intellectual pygmies such as Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Saul Bellow – all of whom have since conceded I was right.
All in all, this "digested read" of Hitch-22 does a fine job of making Hitchens look like the thoroughly ridiculous pompous prick that he is. It includes a nice bit of artwork too. It reminded me of an old episode of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Hitchens was on with writer Dave Barry. I've never liked Barry as a writer, but he had a funny comeback to what he clearly thought was an outrageous instance of pomposity on Hitch's part. The subject of Harry Potter had been brought up. Of course, Hitch was dismissive. But instead of talking about the book, he used the moment as an opportunity to brag about how his 8 year old daughter had just finished reading her fourth "adult-size" novel. I could not find the transcript online, but Barry's response was something like, 'I just wanted to say that my daughter is 21 and she just read The Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian, so I don't want people to think that Christopher has a British accent and is smarter than me and my family'.
Here's the clip (actually it's of the whole second half of the episode - and worth watch it all). It's from December 6, 2001.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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