A substantial collection from an important writer.
A celebrated Urdu writer’s posthumously collected short stories illuminate the human cost and the absurdity of the India-Pakistan Partition.
Manto, widely regarded as the foremost Urdu short story writer of the 20th century, writes tales of brutality, possession, and innocence. These translations of his work by Hasan and Memon illustrate the writer’s ability to regard everyone—crooks, the upper class, politicians, soldiers, housewives, and prostitutes—with an eye trained on humanity. Manto’s characters are forced to consider themselves anew as blood is shed and political boundaries are redrawn. The collection begins with “Kingdom’s End,” in which a series of seemingly random phone calls forces Manmohan to evaluate his life. “Do you like your life?” the caller asks him. He replies: “Give me a few moments....The truth is, I’ve never thought about it.” Manto’s stories often end with a twist, though, so Manmohan’s self-reflection is quickly made difficult. Manto frequently takes on both the divisions created by religion and the vows that people make to each other. In “Two-Nation Theory” and “For Freedom’s Sake,” lovers from different backgrounds are challenged by their unsustainable promises. “As long as India does not win freedom,” the husband says in the latter, “Nigar and I will live not as husband and wife but as friends.” The promise becomes a problem. Occasionally Manto’s purposes are more transparently allegorical, as in the title story, which succeeds in highlighting the atrocities and stupidities of war: When a stray dog crosses battle lines, soldiers on both sides debate its religion and immediately begin to torment the animal. Prostitutes are a frequent subject of Manto’s stories, though their worth is generally defined through male characters’ visions of their physical beauty. Each story makes Manto’s argument plain: Partition divided families and identities, and yet life continued to flourish.
A substantial collection from an important writer.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953861-00-9
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Oddly exquisite.
Part essay, part story, part diatribe, part diary—even part dictionary—this book defies definition.
The narrators of this collection—a loose compilation of short works cut from Gen Z angst and internet gobbledygook—share more than a milieu. In “Love Story,” the fairytales of our youth are supplanted, “Once upon a time” replaced with “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero....She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl.” Later on, “Halloween Forever” showcases another form of affection, that between an internet rabbit-hole denizen and “her” FBI agent, the one the meme says must be watching her. “Internet Girl” catalogs the protagonist’s descent into the digital, from Neopets to naked chat rooms. Managing to reference 2 Girls 1 Cup and 9/11 in a single sentence, the narrator continues apace, jumping from cultural touchstone to cultural touchstone without stopping for breath. The collection does take the occasional detour across a more traditional narrative arc, as in “Cancel Me,” in which the main character is locked out of a party. Standing in the rain with two dimwitted stand-ins for male mediocrity, she contemplates cancel culture, absolution, and, not for the last time, edgelords. The first-person narrators of these stories, only one of whom is named, share a hodgepodge of leftist beliefs not quite coherent enough to serve as evidence in the debate over whether they are in fact the same person. This book is billed as fiction, a truth that may recurrently shock the reader. The fictionality here is another layer to be parsed, along with thick films of irony and sincerity that demand to be scrubbed through by hand. If you text with a single index finger, steer clear. The girls who inhabit this world are only occasionally wise, but always clever.
Oddly exquisite.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593656532
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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