The Saatchi gallery is a marvel. The gallery spaces are immaculate, vast, and free to visit; I would recommend it if only for that. However, their current show, The Empire strikes back: Indian art today, leaves a lot to be desired.

A rare successful installation is Rashid Rana’s The World Is Not Enough, a large composite image made from photographs of social waste from around his home city of Lahore in Pakistan. The images are vivid and overwhelming, providing a stark epitaph to a world slowly filling up with rubbish. Rana’s other piece in the show is likewise a photomontage. In Title of Piece pornographic photographs are used to produce large images of faceless women in burqas. The anonymity of the women in both situations, and way it is presented here, is undoubtedly an intriguing issue. However, one questions whether the drawing together of these two disparate subjects is a successful critique of either ‘negative stereotype’, as the exhibition catalogue claims, and is not simply an antagonistic jibe.

Though I found much of the work in the exhibition both grandiose and gross, highlights included Huma Bhabha’s sculptures which play with materials, the modernist legacy and the motif of the mask.

References to surrealism also run throughout the exhibition, from a Meret Oppenheim-influenced vacuum cleaner with the head of a dog by Bharti Kher, to more complex readings of the genre, such as Atul Dodiya’s Fools House. This is a tribute to Jasper Johns, containing a painted postcard of Man Ray’s Cadeau. Far from emphasizing the painting as a gift, as the reference would suggest, it has an air of aggression. This undermines the painting’s integrity, and raises interesting questions about what can be transmitted when the art object is reproduced.

The Whitechapel Gallery currently hosts Where three dreams cross: 150 years of photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. With the work of around 180 artists it speaks with a multiplicity of voices, examining the social history of these countries. The exhibition is split into categories such as the portrait, the family and the body politic, and my only criticism is that there is almost too much to see. It is staggeringly diverse; 1920’s Bollywood shots to Huma Mulji’s inkjet print photographs such as SIRF TUM (Only You) depict dolls having a romantic moment on a park bench. Ayesha Vellani’s Planting Padi series was also subtly photographed, but very moving.

Both shows are very different. The Whitechapel’s vast, almost archival exhibition engages with life through a camera lems, whereas the Saatchi display, though it presents a great variety of artists, falls slightly flat.

Just what is it about the following passage that fascinates us so? ‘Love, One. Happiness, One. Animals that change their colour, One. Propositions, Seventy-Four. Mines, Two. Honey, One. Laws, Twenty-Four. Juices, Five. Mistaken Pleasures, One. The Sea, One. Poetry, Two. Divinity, Six.’

These, according to Diogenes Laertius, the Dr Johnson of ancient philosophy, are some of the books written by the Peripatetic Theophrastus over the course of his long career. Yet perhaps you read that last paragraph just because you were curious to see what the connection would be, so we’ll try another one, and this time I’ll tell you exactly what the link is. In 1974 Georges Perec, figurehead of the avant-garde OuLiPo movement in France, sat down one morning in the square of St-Sulpice in Paris and tried to write down everything that he saw. Here is an excerpt: ‘Weather: Cool and dry. Grey sky. A few patches of sunlight.

‘Draft inventory for some of the strictly visible things: a few words, ‘KLM’ (on an envelope carried by a passer-by), ‘Taxis tête de station,’ ‘Rue du Vieux-Colombier.’ A few fleeting slogans: ‘De l’autobus, je regarde Paris.’ A few stones: along the edge of the sidewalk, around a fountain, a church, some houses… A fairly large portion of sky (perhaps 1/6 of my field of vision). The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret. The 70 goes to Place du Dr Hayem, to Maison de l’O.R.T.F. Exigez le Roquefort Société le vrai dans son ovale vert. A German bus. Colours: red (a Fiat, a dress St-Raphael, ‘no admittance’ signs), a blue purse, green shoes, a green raincoat, a blue taxi. The 70 goes to Place du Dr Hayem, to Maison de l’O.R.T.F…’

…and so on and so forth, til death us do part. Odd, isn’t it? Why should lists like this, from ‘raindrops on roses’ to ‘the hardy warriors whom Boeotia bred,’ exert this effortless charm over us, a charm greater than mere curiosity? Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists has no answers to this question.

Here, instead, you will find some interesting theoretical distinctions between the genera and phyla of lists – ‘closed’ (so that you do not want to know more) against ‘open’ (so that you do), ‘practical’ (where the things listed are what counts) against ‘poetic’ (where the list itself is the point), ‘chaotic’ against ‘coherent.’ They are not entirely convincing. Each chapter is accompanied by an hors d’oeuvres of examples plucked from art and literature, and often the types seem hardly to cohere, or else there must always be order in the examples of chaos.

Nevertheless, because this is Eco writing, it is engaging, and never less than stimulating. Eco is famous for thought-provoking and allusive historical novels like The Name of the Rose and Baudolino, but he is also a truly excellent critic and philosopher of language. Here he shows his trademark sensitivity to connections to full advantage, and for a man who owns forty thousand books he wears his erudition with a gentlemanly lightness.

His remarks on the way in which we use lists to describe what cannot be described – God, for instance, or the reason why we love – are elegant and backed by a superb selection of sources from Ausonius to Filippo Lippi. He sees our fixation with the list culminating in the World Wide Web, which ‘really does offer us a catalogue of information that makes us feel wealthy and omnipotent, the only snag being that we do not know which of its elements refers to data from the real world and which does not; there is no longer any distinction between truth and error.’

He fails, however, to get to grips with the lists that really count, the lists that underpin the whole of modern thought: the natural numbers, the progression of history, the accumulation of stories. Hobbes’ Leviathan describes imagination as being nothing more than the reassembly of things we have already experienced. If this is true, then what is creativity but the ordering of lists? That said, this book began as a companion piece to the Louvre, and is not so much a work of profound semiology as the catalogue to a universal museum. It is in the exhibits that the true value of the book lies: ultimately this is really a species of sentient coffee-table book.The lists themselves are, as you would expect, a real mixed bag. Some of the anthology is purple prose, some of it modernist poetry, some of it obscure flotsam from the late Latin world, some of it ecstatic nationalist praise poetry, some of it Homer…you get the idea.

There are many snapshots of Rabelais being Rabelaisian a three year old Gargantua telling his father all the torcheculs (‘arsewipers’) he tried before settling on the neck of a goose – and a relentlessly rude vituperatio puellae (like a love poem in reverse) from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘every lover admires his mistress, though she be…a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker…and to thy judgement looks like a merd (‘shit’) in a lantern, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom…’

The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book, a really beautiful book, worth buying if only as an anthology. But in the end, it only grazes the surface of its potential. This could and should be a work of lasting importance for culture, but ultimately it is just a very pretty plaything.

Exclamation marks don’t have a clean record in recent pop history. The resolutely entertaining efforts of The Go! Team, Los Campesinos! and !!! are scarcely able to compensate for Hadouken! and Panic! at the Disco’s sullying of this perennial tool of punctuation. All too often the exclamation mark is used as a cheap signifier for hipster flippancy, and given Lightspeed Champion’s status as one-time hipster-in-chief, the exclamation mark in the middle of Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You made me brace myself for an unwelcome torrent of quirkiness.

However, halfway through the first track, it becomes clear that the album’s chirpy title is an ironic disguise for what is a surprisingly grandiose and ambitious work. Produced by Ben Allen, who worked on Merriweather Post Pavilion, LS!NMY’s orchestral arrangements mark a clear departure from Dev Hynes’ last country-influenced offering. Piano and strings often accompany 70s glam rhythms and guitar solos, a combination which is effective on ‘Madame Van Damme’ and indie-disco stomper ‘Marlene’.

But ultimately, it’s the album’s vaulting ambition which is its greatest shortcoming. In ‘Faculty of Fears’ and ‘Middle of the Dark’ the melodies just aren’t good enough to carry off the unorthodox rhythms and arrangements. At over fifty minutes long the whole thing is too long, with two pointless intermissions and even a piano étude. More intractable problems also remain. The most notable of these is Hynes’ voice, which sounds like a wobbly mixture of Kele Okereke and Conor Oberst, but fails to deliver the lyrical deftness of touch possessed by either man.

It’s hard not to be impressed by what this album tries to achieve, even if it doesn’t achieve it. Hynes seems to aim at something more serious than his previous output, which, though hip has always been patchy. Even with a malcontented lyrical theme, the record is, for better or for worse, as exuberant as the title’s exclamation mark suggests.

Three stars

Animal Kingdom are a band with a sense of perspective. Sure, they might have won the iTunes award for Best New Alternative Artist of 2009. Fine, single ‘Tin Man’ was numerous websites’ track of the month last year. Yeah, they might be about to go on a tour, headlining a show in no less a venue than the mighty Jericho (formerly the Tavern). But it doesn’t get to them. ‘It’d be awesome and really flattering if people wanted to give the album awards or say nice things about it…but ultimately it’s just the four of you, sitting in a room, trying to write songs.’

Richard Sauberlich, the band’s front man, has a touching sense of modesty. He‘s fully aware of how lucky he’s been, emerging in London the way he and his band did. ‘Every band in London does the same thing. You play at any place you can. Then you hear rumours of A&R men turning up, and there’s major excitement, but you never know whether they actually did. It was hard’.

Though he points out that ‘It’s even harder now: fewer bands are getting signed with the record industry as it is’. It doesn’t help either when, as a band, you have severely limited resources. A band now known for their effects-laden sound (‘We like bands who have a lot of atmosphere, space and reverb, basically’) started with just a pair of acoustics. ‘When we first started out, it wasn’t so much that we wanted to be an acoustic act, it was just that we had two guitars and they were both acoustic… once we tried to buy more gear, salvaging it from wherever, so we could get a bit louder’.

And louder they got. With Phil Ek at the helm, they produced one of the stand-out albums of last year. Ek’s resumé is impressive, and Sauberlich certainly appreciates both what he brought to the studio. ‘He had just finished Fleet Foxes record just before he did our one…When we got there we asked what he’d done recently, he said ‘I’ve literally just finished this’ and we were like, ‘Fucking hell, that’s really good.’ Throw in The Shins and some Les Savy Fav for good measure and you have a modern indie icon.

No producer battles on this album then. But its recording and composition weren’t all as simple, and sometimes the smallest things caused havoc. ‘Deciding the tracklist is the biggest headfuck,’ laughs Sauberlich, ‘aside from trying to find a name, (which is the number one headfuck of being in a band)’.

Songs were cut (‘Some of them were real good actually – it’s a shame they didn’t make the album. Some of them no-one will ever get to hear though, because they were so shit’); then the songs were ordered (‘We knew it would be very rare for people to listen to it all in order. That said, we still drove ourselves crazy trying to make it perfect.’) Yet still perfection was hard to come by, ‘After doing that for weeks, you haven’t got a clue what order is good anymore. Maybe next time we’ll draw them out of a hat or something’.

And maybe here is the essence of their perspective. Sauberlich knows that Animal Kingdom have further to go, and is not resting on his laurels. His suggested solution to the iPod shuffle culture is as follows: ‘I guess the onus is on you making an album someone wants to listen to start to finish. If it’s good enough to keep you there I guess it will keep you there.’ And, beyond the reverb, he has healthy respect for the past masters who can keep you rooted to their music. ‘Songs that try and have a message are amazing when people nail it. When someone like Dylan or Neil Young really does it and says something important, it’s great, and that’s why they’re amazing. They can do that, whereas ninety-nine out of a hundred people would deliver it in like a clumsy way’ For the time being, Sauberlich looks on in awe. ‘It would be fucking amazing if one of those songs came out, to be able to nail one of them.’ But Animal Kingdom themselves only stand to get better. As for a new album? ‘We’re working on the next record now. It’s sounding awesome’. Point proved.

Animal Kingdom are playing the Jericho on Friday 19th February.

Louis de Bernières is one of those writers who lets his work do the talking. Included on the Granta List of twenty best young authors at thirty-nine, and commended both critically and commercially for his three epic novels, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Birds Without Wings, shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Award, and A Partisan’s Daughter, shortlisted for the 2008 Costal Novel Award, he can afford to let his reputation speak for itself. As for biography, a couple of minutes on Google could provide the basic outline. His speech at the Oxford Union consisted of reading a couple of short stories, cracking a few jokes, answering questions and leaving. There was the sense that he believed that only his writing could speak. The absence of self-indulgent soliloquy, replaced by self-deprecation and the quick descent of any high-minded phrase into a carefully contrived joke, was there to show that he really didn’t take himself seriously.

‘People are always trying to place you,’ he comments later. ‘With the middle-classes, it’s what school you went to.’ He recognises that identity is something to be played with, occasionally superimposing onto his own the well-worn clichés of French culture, like ordering snails for dinner. All the while, he speaks with his characteristic semi-serious tone. His ancestors were Huguenot refugees in the eighteenth century, so he feels qualified to claim ‘every time I’m vexed about asylum seekers I have to remind myself I am one.’ Well, sort of. It’s as if he is attempting to undermine the stereotype, to show that he’s not just another middle-aged writer from Surrey. Nevertheless, the idea of nationality is clearly something that absorbs him, both in his life and his fiction. Throughout his later novels, characters are continually attempting to break down the classifications that limit who they are: in Captain Corelli, the Italian captain and Pelagia the Greek defy the segregation of different nationalities during wartime; in Birds Without Wings, Philothei and Ibrahim bridge religious differences; in A Partisan’s Daughter, the relationship between Roza and Chris dismantles the idea of two distinct Eastern European and Western European cultures. It is the respect for this theme, he reasons, that marks the difference between the film version of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and the adaptation of Birds Without Wings, produced by a Turkish company. ‘Writing a script for the Turks is quite different from writing a script for Hollywood. They’re interested in presenting the making of the Turkish nation, not just getting ratings. It’s a case of a higher level of thinking.’

This is where the comedian’s mask cracks: he is forced to concede that he does actually consider himself to be ‘quite a serious writer’. When discussing influences, he doesn’t flinch. In addition to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he cites other, ‘unfortunately unrecognised’ Latin American authors, although he does add, ‘probably because no-one else was reading them: there was a certain amount of intellectual snobbery there.’ Again, just as in his novels, he refuses to see himself or anybody as significant. It was his travels in Columbia, he claims, that engendered in him the belief in the ordinariness and pettiness of the world, and the way that it can nevertheless berendered magical and exotic. ‘There is a need in writing to look outwards.’

I ask him whether, after landscape gardening, letter delivering and car fixing, full-time writing was just another job he fell into. ‘Well, fall is a good word actually. I fell off a motorbike.’ As with everything he says, the slapstick humour is a precursor for the serious: ‘I dug out my old short stories, the ones I wrote when I was eighteen. They were just fragments then. A good story can’t be one thing after another. There has to be some sort of crisis that needs to be resolved.’ Perhaps for this reason, aside from Notwithstanding, a series of short stories set in Guildford, he has yet to write a long novel based in the here and now. ‘Authors writing about modernity lack perspective. It’s like writing about filo-faxes. A couple of decades ago, when people were still using them, they could have epitomised the eighties.’ Yet they didn’t. Such images, the icons that define generations, gain significance over time: it is impossible to predict what the next decade will be remembered for. Even those who, like de Bernières, disregard the present and ‘try to be as true to history as possible…do sometimes get it wrong.’

As commercial success has diminished, so has the pressure. Whilst he used to obsess about the next book that he would write, his plans for the future now appear more toned down, more ‘measured’: ‘one huge novel and two short novels.’ He asserts, not without some pride, that his ‘poetic instinct’s come back.’ ‘My main aim now is to amuse myself and let the readers make up their own minds.’ When I refer to Martin Amis’ belief that the writer outlives his talent, he replies ‘I’m sure he’s right. It doesn’t so much die as gradually taper away. One loses confidence.’ This pressure was particularly prominent after the global success of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. ‘It did cause me problems. I felt I had the whole world looking over my shoulders. It was like being stood naked in the middle of Trafalgar Square in the rush hour and being told to get a hard-on.’ He stresses that this constraint was derived from a need for personal development, not from the desire to please his fan base. The ten years that followed were an attempt to distance himself from the novel that made his name.

His attitude to the fluctuating nature of success is refreshingly tongue-in-cheek, perhaps due to the consciousness that popularity is an impermanent state. His last books, although critical successes, failed to inspire the commercial markets as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin did, and throughout the interview he seems aware of the vacuous nature of public acclaim. The focus is now on the ‘smaller things’, the two children for whom he makes ‘toboggans and huge Brazilian samba drums,’ and regrets. ‘I should have asked the right woman to marry me when I had the chance. Then maybe I wouldn’t have ended up such a lonely old bugger.’ Asked in the past whether he worried that he would never match up to the great authors whom he admired, he claims that he ‘found it all rather funny…We have this mentality which you can trace back. We need people on Mount Olympus to enact enormous dramas on our behalf. Our mentality isn’t really that different from the Ancient Greeks. They had Aphrodite, we have…Katie Price.’ God help us.