In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
The linked stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders illuminate a place and a people as they describe the overlapping worlds of an extended Pakistani landowning family: the servants and dependents in Mr. K.K. Harouni's overflowing Lahore household, the peasants on his estates who rely on his favor, and the parallel world of his industrialist brother, who has distanced himself from the feudal past. Inextricably bound to each other, the characters confront the advantages and constraints of station, the dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. A girl, a socialite from a decayed feudal family, tires of endless parties, of drinking and drugs, and marries a young landlord in an attempt to reinvent herself. A light-fingered electrician who by tricks and ingenuity supports his twelve daughters comes perilously close to losing all that he has worked for. Elsewhere, an aged laborer by a stroke of luck earns enough money to marry a young, mentally disturbed girl - who vanishes soon after the wedding, exposing the old man to charges of murder.These richly textured stories reveal - at times humorously, at times tragically - the complexities of Pakistani class and culture, as they describe the loves, triumphs, misunderstandings and tragedies of this diverse group of characters.
4.6 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Short Stories, General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
256 |
| RRP |
£14.99 |
| Date of Publication |
April 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0747597131 |
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury |
| |
The linked stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders illuminate a place and a people as they describe the overlapping worlds of an extended Pakistani landowning family: the servants and dependents in Mr. K.K. Harouni's overflowing Lahore household, the peasants on his estates who rely on his favor, and the parallel world of his industrialist brother, who has distanced himself from the feudal past. Inextricably bound to each other, the characters confront the advantages and constraints of station, the dissolution of old ways, and the shock of change. A girl, a socialite from a decayed feudal family, tires of endless parties, of drinking and drugs, and marries a young landlord in an attempt to reinvent herself. A light-fingered electrician who by tricks and ingenuity supports his twelve daughters comes perilously close to losing all that he has worked for. Elsewhere, an aged laborer by a stroke of luck earns enough money to marry a young, mentally disturbed girl - who vanishes soon after the wedding, exposing the old man to charges of murder.These richly textured stories reveal - at times humorously, at times tragically - the complexities of Pakistani class and culture, as they describe the loves, triumphs, misunderstandings and tragedies of this diverse group of characters.
Reviews
The Financial Times
William Dalrymple
“His stories have not just a fluency and perfection of shape; above all they have an authenticity of observation and dialogue rooted from long experience living among the people he is writing about. The result is a unique book, probably the best fiction ever written in English about Pakistan, and one of the best to come out of south Asia in a very long time.”
07/03/2009
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The New York Times
Dalia Sofer
“[An] excellent book... For a country whose name means “land of purity,” Pakistan is startlingly blemished. Yet Mueenuddin’s talent lets us perceive not just its machinations but also its beauty — the mango orchards, a charpoy laid out in the shade of a mammoth banyan tree, the smoke of a hookah on a spring afternoon, “eucalyptus trees planted by some briefly energetic government.””
06/02/2009
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The Observer
Tim Adams
“Mueenuddin writes with the freshness of an exile and the intimacy of an insider about Pakistani culture, both in rural Dunyapur in the Punjab, where most of the stories are set, and around the wealthy dining tables of Karachi and New York and Paris. There are tremendous stories here and if they are not autobiographical, then they are all clearly grounded in lived experience... "Nawabdin Electrician"...bears comparison with Biswas-era Naipaul”
12/10/2009
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The Economist
The Economist
“[A] remarkable debut... Mueenuddin, who was brought up in Lahore and in Elroy, Wisconsin, has a talent for switching voices. He is as adept at capturing the considered musings of a judge in his Pakistani home town as the blunt instructions of a landlord’s sidekick in rural Punjab... a poignant picture of Punjabi life from top to bottom.”
19/02/2009
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The Washington Post
Michael Dirda
“Many of Mueenuddin's stories conform to a common dynamic: We learn about a character's past, then zero in on the central crisis of his or her life and, even while we expect more development, suddenly find everything wound up in a paragraph or two: "The next day two men loaded the trunks onto a horse-drawn cart and carried them away to the Old City." (Flaubert or Chekhov might have written that.)... a collection full of pleasures.”
15/02/2009
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The Sunday Times
Lucy Atkins
“These stories are so engrossing that there is a wrench when one ends and the next must begin: it feels as though there is a novel lurking, desperate to come out. This is either a hitch or a sign of great things to come.”
29/03/2009
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