The Writers’ Pick
Renowned Pakistani authors choose their favourite reads of the past year.
Mirza Athar Baig
Mirza Athar Baig
My experience with books during 2009 continued to be largely determined by the exigencies of my literary and academic pursuits, but less pedantically speaking, ultimately by the sheer joy reading affords. I would love to share briefly with the readers, my reading experience of at least three books: two novels and one non-fiction work.
Reading J.M.G. Le Clezio’s The Interrogation initially had Sartrean overtones for me and reminded me of Sartre’s Nausea, but then the resemblance faded at the level of the treatment of ‘reality.’ The narrative develops through multiple voices portraying the existence of Adam Pollo, who has just abandoned himself to the mercy of the event-generating forces of the world, as if letting things happen to him. The result, interestingly enough, is not completely surrealistic in any overtly Kafkaesque sense; it is rather a reading landscape where reality is not the real issue, and understandably so, as Le Clezio warns in his short foreword: “I have made very little attempt at realistic treatment (I have a stronger and stronger impression that there is no such thing as reality).”
Reality, in the old hackneyed sense of the philistine, might not be a big issue in the French tradition of the avant-garde, but it appears to be a matter of life and death for Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, desperately trying to understand the reality of the “suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head scarves” in Snow. The cultural and cognitive reality of the contemporary Muslim world in the mutually ambivalent perspectives of western modernity and Islam is the formidable question for Pamuk in almost all his writings. The literary stratagem employed by Pamuk is the creation of a godforsaken town named Kars, completely sealed off from the world not only because of its geographical location but more menacingly, through an apparently never-ending snow storm. A bit mechanical, or laboured at places, Snow is a fascinating read and, I daresay, especially instructive for writers juggling with the idea of writing fiction based on the present- day complex phenomena of the Muslim mind.
I had planned my reading of Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference by Thomas P. Kasulis as a part of my ongoing research aimed at exploring the cultural bases of knowledge and education in our parts of the world. However, the book proved to be of significance not only for the students of philosophy but for anyone interested in understanding the most explosive question of the time – how cultures generate ‘the realities’ of their own and how the worlds generated by them can come to war. In fact, the questions discussed by Kasulis through a conceptual comparison of the Japanese and American cognitive cultures, remain the same, which are at the heart of the two novels as well, and which are clearly stated in the introduction to the volume. How can I know something? How can I convince someone of the rightness of my position? What is artistic creativity? And of course, how does reality function?
More writers’ picks on the next page . . .
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here’s to four years of KU fun:)