Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2009, 224 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2010, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Karen Rigby
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Daniyal Mueenuddin's first book has been called "a debut as auspicious as Jhumpa Lahiri's" (Nadeem Aslam). Considering Lahiri's debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, the comparison suggests there are high expectations for Mueenuddin. Luckily for us, his collection of eight related stories more than satisfies.
While In Other Rooms, Other Wonders can be read as a study in contrasts, from the socialite wedding in "Lily" to the marriage between a groundskeeper and a villager in "A Spoiled Man", they reveal more similarities than differences. Whether we find the characters in tree-lined estates or servants' quarters, nearly all of them are driven towards finding love or seeking advancement in post-colonial Pakistan. The effects of a feudal past on its inheritors would provide enough material for several books; Mueenuddin focuses on the drama in a handful of households, where drug abuse, murder, liaisons and the threat of cobras are equally at home with trips to the theater.
Several of these stories portray women's disappointments in marriage, adultery, or otherwise less-than-satisfying relationships. Read in a larger context, these problems could be viewed as symptomatic of a society that doesn't appear to offer viable alternatives for women to secure their futures in ways that extend beyond their reliance on a sexualized master/servant relationship. The repetition of this theme could weigh on readers sensitive to the suggestion that sex is for bargaining, but Mueenuddin handles the subject especially well. There's no sense of voyeurism in the bedroom scenes, and no overt preaching about inequality, gender roles, or social justice. The beauty of these stories is found in the absence of generalizations, and in the inclusion of telling details. Mueenuddin's attention to everything from clothing to physical gestures reveals a genuine passion for creating vibrant characters - the women remain individuals rather than seeming like messengers for a particular cause. Their suffering is not presented as the inevitable consequence for their choices, and even if some of them possess unpleasant traits, they're still captivating and multi-layered.
One of the more intriguing female characters is Sonya, the American wife in "A Spoiled Man", whose benevolence leads her to preserve a servant's shack as a memorial and as a conversation starter after his death. The gesture is a complicated mixture of public acknowledgment for his service, naïve curiosity, and tastelessness. Mueenuddin deftly illustrates Sonya's approach towards being a stranger in a strange land, where gestures of goodwill and charity can carry uncomfortable implications of superiority.
Mueenuddin often uses sudden twists-of-fate -- the appearance of a gunman, revelation of terminal illness, the timely arrival of a letter -- to catalyze the drama in his stories. Life can often bring about unexpected events, but these moments feel a little convenient at times, as though they've been included solely to hasten the story's climax and a character's demise. Nevertheless, this is a relatively minor issue in light of the author's otherwise thoughtful structure and talent for shaping female characters.
As in the best collections, the stories enhance each other, forging connections between recurrent characters and building a world where real locations like Islamabad and Lahore blend with imagined households. The stories illuminate the darker side of negotiating one's place in a country where survival depends on hustling and where a handful of nearly dynastic families still wield their power. Themes of struggle and progress may be familiar, but Mueenuddin's rich stories make them fresh and powerful, marking an auspicious debut.
This review was originally published in March 2009, and has been updated for the
February 2010 paperback release.
Click here to go to this issue.
Daniyal Mueenuddin on Farming, Traveling West, and Returning Home to Write
"For many years I have run a farm in Pakistan's southern Punjab. Most of the stories in this book have their origins in my experiences there, and many were written there. Half Pakistani and half American, I have spent equal amounts of time in each country, and so, knowing both cultures well and belonging to both, I equally belong to neither, look at both with an outsider's eye. These stories are written from that place in between, written to help both me and my reader bridge the gap.
My father was a graduate of Oxford, a member first of the Indian and then, after Partition, of the Pakistani civil service - and, most fundamentally, a land owner of the old Punjabi feudal class. My American mother, a reporter with the Washington Post, met my father in Washington, where he was negotiating a treaty. She was twenty seven years younger than him. They married and soon after - in 1960 - moved back to Pakistan.
We lived in Lahore, where I attended the American School until I was thirteen, my classmates the children of westernized Pakistanis or of the few foreigners pursuing their oblique lives in this marginal place. My family spent most vacations on the farm that I now manage, where I ran free day and night with the children of the village, was in and out of their houses, ate with them, explored with them, swam with them. In Lahore I was closer to the old servant who brought me up than to anyone else - thirty years after his death I still wear the bracelet he gave me when I went off to school in America. Because I was a child, the servants and the villagers were not guarded against me, unaware that I was watching; and therefore I learned the rhythms and details of their lives in a way that I never could as a grownup. I heard the women in the village calling to each other over their common walls, walked out with the boys when they took their buffaloes to be watered at the canal. These people, their gestures and intonations as I observed them in my childhood, appear throughout the stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.
At thirteen I was packed off to boarding school in Massachusetts. Five years of full-dress dinners, Latin grammar, lacrosse, and daily chapel, lacquered me to a glossy Boston-Episcopalian sheen, so that by the time I arrived at Dartmouth College I more or less passed as an American. There I wrote poetry, protested against apartheid, sweated it out in the library stacks -- and popped out after four years with a degree in English literature, a debased currency. My aging father had been sending increasingly pressing letters, telling me I must return to Pakistan and take care of the family property, and so, after reflection, I complied."
Read on to find out how Mueenuddin took over the farm, left to practice law in New York, and returned to Pakistan to write these stories.
This review was originally published in March 2009, and has been updated for the
February 2010 paperback release.
Click here to go to this issue.
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