amaan
read up until the last story, but it took me months to get through the book; not because the writing is difficult or the subject matter is uniquely disturbing, but just because of the irritation I felt every time I read it. the only positive thought I have on this book is that I liked how the stories were loosely interconnected. theoretically, also, the idea of these stories as brief windows into various people's lives is interesting, but I'm sure it's been done before, and much better.
this book felt... not pretentious, but something along those lines. it's one of those things you read not particularly for your interest in its contents but for the impression it gives other people. I found myself barely invested in most stories, and my enjoyment of those I found interesting was dampened by unimpactful and unsatisfying endings that I feel contributed nothing good.
a reflective read. I found it overly-wordy at times, verging on pretentious. the ideas themselves are interesting. enjoyed how much other literature and ideas were referenced, even if some of those mentions seemed half-baked. the ethnofictive form of this book does help the reader follow a train of thought which otherwise may be easy to get lost in. it's an effective way of introducing characters (like the old woman or the friend who owns the boat) that exemplify certain ideas and characterise varying view points.
I did, though, find a lot of it to be intensely narcissistic. as a result of the form—of its fictionalised nature—people are become paradigms instead of people.
a lot of it is simply the self-flagellatory musings of a privileged individual. the fictional narrative form does not do any favours to this book's focus on theory; I ended it feeling like the messaging of the book is void of any meaningful action.
good collection of short stories! wouldn't say it's a light read, as it explores some heavy themes and there are mentions of very upsetting things (check the content warnings on this review), but it is by and far an easy read if you go in prepared. I loved the reflections chapter at the end, that was great.
So then if it wasn't me, then who was it? God? That's right. Because there was only God and me seeing how it happened. We were the only other ones who saw the look in her eyes, saw the baby's head peeping over her shoulder! So if it wasn't me, was it Him? God Almighty, who was stupid enough to make this bloody world in seven days. Yes. Miss Conradie. Stupid. Because I certainly wouldn't. But as it so happens, Miss Conradie, God was only a witness, because it was Roelf Visagie who was tramping down so hard on the brake so that the wheels was screeching on the tracks. It was Roelf Visagie not God there in the cab screaming to her to get out of the fucking way.
“She was very sick just before she dies so she always ask me to sit with her and sing. She also tell me I got good voice for singing. But when I sing always she cries. Even with the happy songs. ‘Grandma,' I ask, ‘why you cry?' She just shake her head and tell me: ‘Go to America, my carino. Is no good in Mexico now. When you are big go to America.'
HENRY: I get it now. When I first walked in here last Christmas and you saw another borracho perdido... and you saw Roberto. Right?
ADELA (Again defensively): Sí... because I no like borracho perdido.
HENRY: Relax, Adela. Nobody does.
HENRY: There... gouged out in the tarmac surface in front of one of the parking bays, and obviously intended for the car and its occupants that had been parked there, was the Star of David... Do you know what that is, Adela?
(He goes to the chalkboard menu, wipes away what was written, then takes a piece of chalk and draws the Star of David.)
ADELA: (Reluctantly nodding) Sí.
HENRY: And next to it, gouged out with the same precise and vicious determination, were three words.
(He writes on the menu chalkboard. “Fuck You Jew.” He does not speak them. Nobody in this play speaks them.)”
HENRY: Forgive me. Please forgive me.
SOLLY (Nodding his head slowly.) Of course I forgive you. What did you do?
HENRY: I hated you.
SOLLY: I know. (Pause. They look unflinchingly into each other's eyes.) But why?
HENRY: You were ugly... you were a Jew...
SOLLY: I still am.
I knew it for what it was and it was mine. I wasn't going to touch it with words. All I can tell you for sure is that the journey from hate to love was the shortest one my heart has ever made.
How certain we are of ourselves, she thought, in this huge abyss of unknown ends.
Memories are cardboard clean, but pictures lie.
It was a time marked by the cusp amid lurid fantasy and the whimsical fascination of dreams, each person in the house strung to their own truth about the omnipresent things in their lives.
He was no artist but he knew that the collapse of reality in the face of a single longing was the greatest failure of the human mind, and that's when he remembered Zaib as a mere mortal.
This book was admittedly hard to read through, and the first serious challenge I've faced while reading in a while, but getting through it was so worth it. There are definitely sections of the book that even repeated re-reading does not help me to comprehend better (or at all) but other parts are so profound, and poetic and hard-hitting that the difficult writing style doesn't matter to me. I have too many favourite quotes from the book to list them all, but I'll list some choice favourites below.
But we had lost something, a certain protective aura, some unspoken myth asserting that love between sisters at least was sexually innocent. Now we had to fold that vain belief away and stand in more naked relation to our affection. Till then we had associated such violence with all that was outside us, as though somehow the more history fractured, the more whole we could be. But we began to lose that sense of the differentiated identities of history and ourselves and became guiltily aware that we had known it all along, our part in the construction of unreality.
In an unspoken way, though, I think we dimly knew we were about to witness Islam's departure from the land of Pakistan. The men would take it to the streets and make it a vociferate, but the great romance between religion and the populace, the embrace that engendered Pakistan, was done. So Papa prayed, with the desperate ardor of a lover trying to converse life back into a finished love.
By the time I reached Lahore, a tall and slender mound had usurped the grave-space where my father had hoped to lie, next to the more moderate shape that was his wife. Children take over everything.
‘What you would love most,' she wrote to me some months later, ‘are the rooftops. They have a slant that would ravish you.' For, as an oblique reparation for her inability to look at me again, Mustakor had slipped into the habit of looking at the world as if through my eyes.
He must have known some of the same exigencies: once in a while he would still wish to pull me back into the familiarity of his day, calling me with the terrible hesitance of someone who no longer trusts his license to intrude. [...] Some chemicals of tenderness of course would always wake up with a start to the sound of his voice, but listening to that sequence was a terrifying thing, as though I were being methodically slapped by the inevitability of my own irrelevance.
What a strange occasion it must have been: crowds of hundreds of thousands gathering in the open field next to the Badshahi Mosque, of which how many understood the two-hour speech that Jinnah rose to give, prefaced with the calm disclaimer, ‘The world is watching us, so let me have your permission to have my say in English'?
‘I am not talking about the two-nation theory,' I wept to my father, ‘I am talking about blood!' He would not reply, and so we went our separate ways, he mourning for the mutilation of a theory and I – more literal – for a limb, or a child, or a voice.
Then I realised what I must have known all along: of course, Ifat's story has nothing to do with dying; it has to do with the price a mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body.
Ifat watched my face; ‘It doesn't matter, Sara,' she once told me ruefully. ‘Men live in homes, and women live in bodies.'
But we have managed to live with ourselves, it seems, making a habit of loss. ‘The thought most killing to me,' I told Tillat, ‘is – if Ifat could be asked – how firmly she would swear that we would never let the children go.' Tillat winced.
Chris: Ann, I love you. I love you a great deal. [Finally] I love you. [Pause. She waits.] I have no imagination... that's all I know to tell you.
Chris: I felt wrong to be alive, to open the bank-book, to drive the new car, to see the new refrigerator. I mean you can take those things out of a war, but when you drive that car you've got to know that it came out of the love a man can have for a man, and you've got to be a little better because of that. Otherwise what you really have is loot, and there's blood on it.
Mother: I told you to marry that girl and stay out of the war!
George: [laughs at himself] She used to laugh too much.
Mother: And you didn't laugh enough. While you were getting mad about Fascism, Frank was getting into her bed.
Mother: Your brother's alive, darling, because if he's dead, your father killed him. Do you understand me now? As long as you live, that boy is alive. God does not let a son be killed by his father.
Chris: Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? What is that, the world—the business? What the hell do you mean, you did it for me? Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you? You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you?
Jim: Oh, no, he'll come back. We all come back, Kate. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made.
Keller: There's nothin' in this world he could do that I wouldn't forgive. Because he's my son. Because I'm his father and he's my son.Mother: Joe, I tell you...Keller: Nothin's bigger than that. And you're goin' to tell him, you understand? I'm his father and he's my son, and if there's something bigger than that I'll put a bullet in my head!
Chris: Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honour was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!
Chris: I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.
Chris: Then what was Larry to you? A stone that fell into the water? It's not enough for him to be sorry. Larry didn't kill himself to make you and Dad sorry.Mother: What more can we be!Chris: You can be better!