A rare, wonderful gift of a novel that defies mere plot synopsis: a complex fictional world that illuminates the real one...
A contemporary romantic tragedy displays a startlingly fresh voice as Khan illuminates the complex social, religious, and economic mores of Pakistan while offering an outsider’s hard-eyed perspective on American attitudes during the first Gulf War.
Dia’s Western-educated mother, Riffat, who has run the family’s silk business since her husband’s random murder, raises Dia to share her independent thinking and assures her daughter that she’ll be allowed to marry for love. Daanish is an Amherst journalism student on a visit home after his father Shafqat’s death. Daanish is frustrated by the prejudice he encountered and the sloppy journalism he witnessed in America, but he can’t find a place for himself in Karachi, either. He adored Shafqat, an enlightened doctor who traveled the world, but Daanish’s smothering and needy Pakistani mother, the traditional Anu, is pushing him into an arranged marriage with Dia’s best friend Nini. When Daanish and Dia meet, though, the attraction of like minds is as strong as their sexual tension. Soon, they are arranging trysts. While Dia is head-over-heals in first love, Daanish has a more casual American attitude, though neither knows that they are following in their parents’ footsteps, that Riffat and Shafqat had a love affair years earlier in England. Dia and Daanish’s ill-fated affair forms the story’s main arc, but Khan surrounds the couple with a richly drawn Pakistan filled with characters struggling to survive with some semblance of dignity: Nini, who tries to make up for her early British education by being the extra-dutiful Pakistani daughter, and bitter Anu, who destroys all Shafqat’s gifts to Daanish. Foremost is the driver Salaamat, whose fishing community was destroyed by foreign trawlers and who considers the central romance trivial compared to the issues of survival he’s faced.
A rare, wonderful gift of a novel that defies mere plot synopsis: a complex fictional world that illuminates the real one and seamlessly merges the personal with the larger sociopolitical conundrums we all face today.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7574-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.
Hamid (Discontent and Its Civilizations, 2014, etc.) crafts a richly imaginative tale of love and loss in the ashes of civil war.
The country—well, it doesn’t much matter, one of any number that are riven by sectarian violence, by militias and fundamentalists and repressive government troops. It’s a place where a ponytailed spice merchant might vanish only to be found headless, decapitated “nape-first with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort.” Against this background, Nadia and Saeed don’t stand much of a chance; she wears a burka but only “so men don’t fuck with me,” but otherwise the two young lovers don’t do a lot to try to blend in, spending their days ingesting “shrooms” and smoking a little ganga to get away from the explosions and screams, listening to records that the militants have forbidden, trying to be as unnoticeable as possible, Saeed crouching in terror at the “flying robots high above in the darkening sky.” Fortunately, there’s a way out: some portal, both literal and fantastic, that the militants haven’t yet discovered and that, for a price, leads outside the embattled city to the West. “When we migrate,” writes Hamid, “we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” True, and Saeed and Nadia murder a bit of themselves in fleeing, too, making new homes in London and then San Francisco while shed of their old, innocent selves and now locked in descending unhappiness, sharing a bed without touching, just two among countless nameless and faceless refugees in an uncaring new world. Saeed and Nadia understand what would happen if millions of people suddenly turned up in their country, fleeing a war far away. That doesn’t really make things better, though. Unable to protect each other, fearful but resolute, their lives turn in unexpected ways in this new world.
One of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory and a book to savor even while despairing of its truths.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-73521-217-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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