In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

This terrific book is made up of short stories that are linked, and you see some of the same characters at different points in time and place. It's not that easy to do, but Mueensuddin pulls it off perfectly, and you get to know each character in almost a Rashamon way - through their own eyes and through those of others. If you think that you really dislike or favor someone, just wait. You may think differently later on. These stories have locations in common too, and the majority of the book takes place near Lahore, on the farmlands of a wealthy Pakistani family. We are shown what life is like for the poor, and for the rich. We become acquainted with landowners, and the workers and servants, and how bad luck or one bad decision can result in catastrophe. Success and happiness in life often depends on the circumstances of one's birth, and the reader gets a lesson about Pakistani culture, and its harshness, its dependence on knowing the right people, and its fatalism. And throw luck into the mix. And because the stories take place at different times, we see how modernization has affected Pakistan - and how some things remain the same. If you were a fan of A Fine Balance (one of my favorite books), or The God of Small Things, I can *guarantee* that you will love this book. Like those great novels, this one can be both heartbreaking and funny, and many times you will be smiling at some amusing passage only to be devastated by the next. One other thing to add - I am not, in general, a big fan of short stories. If you feel this way too, do not be put off by the fact this is a book of stories. Both because the book is so well-written, and because the stories share commonality of characters and place, it reads like a novel. So, highly, highly recommended. This is going down as one of my top reads of the year. It's that good. (And you'll be hooked from page one - another big plus.)

Even in the rich field of fiction from the Indian sub-continent, this new book by Daniyal Mueenuddin stands out. A set of eight stories about the relatives and retainers of the wealthy Harouni family, it may not develop a continuous narrative like a novel, but it does have a distinct shape, as one story builds on the ones before and deepens this picture of Pakistani life on the cusp between an age-old feudal system and the international modern world. A few of the characters may have traveled to England or America; however, this book is not about the emigrant experience, but firmly rooted in the culture of Pakistan. More even than Aravind Adiga did for India in THE WHITE TIGER, this portrays an interdependent world of rich and poor, linked by common humanity and reft by callousness, that is both a revelation and totally believable. The eight stories are arranged roughly chronologically; they also move upwards in the social scale from servants and hangers-on to members of the Harouni family itself. We meet a workman on one of the family farms who lives by an improvised genius for fixing things. Then a house servant who becomes the mistress of an old valet. Then a corrupt estate manager who moves into politics. The title story is about an impoverished female relative who brings joy to old Harouni himself in his last months. The most beautifully-balanced story of all for me, "Our Lady of Paris," breaks the pattern by being set in France; its protagonist, Harouni's nephew Sohail, goes to Paris to be with an American girlfriend whom he met at Yale, but the foreign setting only emphasizes the difference between their lives and expectations. Sohail returns in the longest story of the set, "Lily," but the main character of this moving almost-novella is a party girl who meets a good man and tries to put her old life behind her. The whole collection might be said to be about change, but also the impossibility of change. As one generation of Harounis gives way to the next, feudal customs give way to modernity, but essential attitudes remain. Almost all the tales are about people trying to better themselves or to alter their situation, through patronage, marriage, or love. If I have one small reservation about the book, it is that so few of these attempts succeed; some even end in tragedy. I suspect that this is a realistic view of this society, where other people's aspirations can often be treated as disposable. But for the duration of each story at least, Mueenuddin makes one see with their eyes and feel through their skin, and that itself is a precious wonder. [4.5 stars]

It is impossible to say enough about these subtle, deep, painful stories which remind me of Chekhov. In all the tales, revolving somehow around a very rich Pakistani landowner and his family, the poet Burn's line "man's inhumanity to man" kept echoing in my mind. I was enthralled by the unique vision and skill of the writer and at the same time truly depressed by the stories. The rich see nothing outside themselves but for brief moments; they have little joy and the poor are less than chattel to them. The poor or those fallen from prosperity cluster about them, hanging on to their feet for dear life, and inevitably falling away. If love begins to blossom in these stories, it will fail by one partner's flawed nature or parents' manipulative intervention. If any character has a sweet or generous nature, he or she is totally extinguished. Women fare the worse, being kept as mistresses until the man dies and then losing everything. What a picture it paints of a feudal society though throughout the classes! Nawabdin the electrician can fix any machine with mango sap and makeshift wiring until it soon breaks again; he married, early in his life, "a sweet woman of unsurpassed fertility" who gave him twelve daughters for whom he must find dowries by turning his hand to dozens of little businesses until a thief in even more desperate condition tries to kill him for his motorcycle. Lily, a woman in her 30s who is weary of a life of loose sex and wild parties, vows to change into a model farmer's wife when she marries the decent son of a rich landowner. She discovers once married that "I'm not the type to be dutiful. I'm messy and willful and self-destructive." (The paragraph which ends this story is so brilliant I read it three times.) And the last story with the character I loved the best, "a small, bowlegged man with a lopsided face," a dirt-poor peasant so devoted to the garden which a rich woman hires him to tend that he lovingly buys grape vines with his own money. For these characters and many more, the author sings a sonorous lament with his prose. A very sad book, but wonderfully written, just wonderfully.

We'd all like, at times, to reinvent ourselves. To go off where we are unknown and be someone different, escape the expectations of others and be absolutely free. But no one in Daniyal Mueenuddin's book is free to change their destinies in the class conscious world of Pakistan where everyone knows one's family and one's history. "That's the point," one character laments, "You take chances and then nothing really changes." Through lust, greed, passion, love, and duty, she, like all the wonderfully drawn characters in this perfect jewel of a book, seeks to be someone new, yet, finally "she went back to being--exactly--herself." You absolutely deserve to visit other rooms, consider other wonders. Read this book.

This intertwined collection of stories is so mesmerizing, so polished, that it's hard to believe this is a fictional debut. Mueenuddin creates a wholly believable world of masters and servants in a sprawling family farm outside of Lahore. It's a visually beautiful locale: mango orchards, sugar cane fields, bouganivilla vines. Yet within the beauty lies a world where the servant class -- particularly women -- must claw and scratch their way to survival, giving themselves body and soul to their corrupt landowners, turning to drugs to dull the pain, seeking to rise in a microcosmic world that holds them down. It's a world where police beat the helpless, where the powerful trample the poor, where there is no community in togetherness. Each story has its own particular mastery; to me, the first, Nawabdin Electrician, was the most powerful. In this story, Nawab, who has developed a technique for slowing down the revolutions of electric meters, is given a motorcycle by his benefactor. He encounters a would-be thief, whom he eventually castigates with these word: "You had your life. I had mine. At every step of the road I went the right way and you went the wrong way..." The irony, of course, is that BOTH went the wrong way and BOTH tried hard to survive. The detailed sketching of these characters is incredible. I've noticed that Mohsin Hamid provided an endorsement for this book; his own book, Moth Smoke, is a worthy additional look at Pakistani life. This collection is, indeed, evocative of James Joyce's The Dubliners; it's a book that begs to be read.