This week, I’ve been thinking about a book – You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024 by Tariq Ali, published by Verso in 2024.
I’ve been thinking about it, but I’ve been quite uncertain how to talk about it. Let me explain.
Tariq Ali is a well-known radical and writer. He was born into a prominent family in Pakistan in 1943. He moved to the UK as a student in the 1960s where he rebelled against the orthodox Communism of his parents by becoming a Trotskyist, and he ended up as one of the best known opponents in that country of the Vietnam War. Decades ago, he wrote a memoir of that time called Street Fighting Years (thus named because the Rolling Stones song “Street-Fighting Man” was actually written with Ali in mind). You Can’t Please All begins more or less when he decided to leave active involvement in the Trotskyist movement and focus more of his energies on cultural, media, and intellectual work, though he has remained committed to revolutionary politics and is a high-profile figure of the international left up to today.
I first encountered Ali’s work when he came to Toronto to give a lecture not long after 9/11, and I subsequently read and really liked his Clash of Fundamentalisms about the politics of that moment. He has written lots of other nonfiction books and articles, a bunch of novels — I think I’ve read one of those, maybe two, I don’t recall — and some plays. He has been involved in the radical journal New Left Review since the early ‘80s and also its book publishing arm, Verso, which published this book. And in reading this I learned that in the ‘80s and ‘90s he was also very involved in TV and film production, bringing lots of interesting, radical stuff to mainstream viewers in the UK.
I read this book because, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m contemplating doing some work related to the relationship between collective struggles for justice and liberation, and more solitary sorts of creative work, like writing. One of the things I’m doing as part of that is reading material about and from people who are committed to both, as Ali clearly is. This book wasn’t necessarily the most useful for the specific questions I’m most interested in because it’s very much an externally focused memoir about the people he met and the things he was involved in rather than about his internal deliberations, but there were a few little bits and pieces that felt relevant. Plus, he’s an entertaining writer, he has lots of good stories, and it provides interesting glimpses into the trajectory of the left over the years in question, so I’m glad I read it.
That said, I’m not really sure if or how to recommend it. It meanders a lot and it does a lot of different things. Some is memoir, some is gossip, some is commentary on this or that political event, some feels like randomly inserted bits of writing of other sorts. It is a very indulgent book and it really could’ve done with some stricter editing — no doubt, given his prominent role at Verso, he was more or less able to do whatever he wanted with the book. And it’s over 800 pages and a print copy costs an astounding C$60, so I did something I almost never do and bought it as an e-book for a third of the price. So I’m not really sure who would want to read it. But…if it sounds interesting, I can assure you that there’s plenty of good stuff in there, even if there’s also some that probably should’ve been cut.