1. The Gold Ring; 2. Snow Fun
(Both books part of Gurlz Club Series)
Author: Samiya Khan
Published by: Ilqa Publications (An Imprint of Readings), Main Boulevard, Gulberg II, Lahore
Pages: 111 & 117; Price: Rs150/- each
Samiya Khan (b.1998) is a fiction writer from Jeddah. She was only 10-year old when her first novel Gurlz Club: The Gold Ringsaw the light of the day (2008). It was followed by another viz., Snow Fun. Milan Kundera (b.1929) is a French writer of Czech origin. Baqa-e-Dawam is the Urdu version of his widely acclaimed Czech novel Nesmrtelnost (1988), translated into English by Peter Kussi as Immortality (1991). Noted Urdu fiction writer and poet Asad Muhammad Khan’s (b.1932) collection of short stories titled Burj-e-KhamoshaN is his latest publication. This review seeks to cover all four of these books.
The Gold Ring and Snow Fun
The story of The Gold Ring revolves around three teenagers Anam, Maniza and Samiya — related inter se, and studying in the same class — who call themselves ‘The Gurlz Club’. It is a quasi-detective narrative – a teacher loses her gold ring, she won’t teach the class if her ring were not traced and recovered. The Gurlz Club accepts the challenge. The mystery is resolved at long last. It is a thirty-one chapter brittle story whose plot is woven around the familiar locales of the classroom, canteen and shopping mall. Amazingly Samiya has the talent to engage her readers’ curiosity to the last.
The backdrop of the mystery story in Snow Fun is Chicago. The fictional character of Nancy Drew publicized by Edward Stratemeyer in the 1930’s and children’s author Jacqueline Wilson (b.1945) are admittedly the inspiration behind the work. The trio of Samiya, Anam and Maniza is here joined by Osman, Anam’s brother. They are on a holiday trip to the ‘winter wonderland’ of Chicago.
The text of this novel also spans thirty-one chapters. Coincidentally, the Gurlz Club comprising the three teen detectives accompanied by their kinsman Osman, are again engaged in an intriguing situation arising from the pilferage of valuable pieces of art from residences in Chicago’s Sean Neighbourhood. They relish in resolving the mystery, not with the help of the sophisticated modern gadgetry but with their brimming brains. ‘Use your intelligence and get a clue’ is their modus operandi. The narrative, though understandably a little naïve, is quite racy. Samiya Khan deserves kudos for producing the two verily mature novels at an unripe age of 10 or 11.
Baqa-e-Dawam
Author: Milan Kundera
Translator: Arshad Waheed
Published by: Jamhoori Publications, Aiwan-e-Tijarat. Lahore
Pages: 357; Price: Rs700/-
Baqa-e-Dawam
The book is a translated version of Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s original work in Czech titled Nesmrtelnost (Immortality), published in 1988. It springs from a casual but youthful gesture of an old (youngish) woman, seemingly to her swimming instructor. The work is divided into seven parts with the chief characters being Agnes, her husband Paul and her sister Laura. The locale is Paris which also happens to be the author’s adopted habitat.
The novel is an alluring contemplation of ‘the nature of the desire for immortality, the desire to control one’s reputation, and how the dead are remembered’. The author seems to reflect over ‘the relative uniqueness and longevity of gestures and people’ – people being the ‘vessels of gestures’.
Characters are introduced in the first part. The second deals with Goethe’s unrequited relationship with Bettina who wanted to establish herself in history ‘by controlling Goethe’s legacy after his death’. In the third sequence Agnes and Laura are shown fighting which entails a host of symbolistic happenings criss-crossing the desire for immortality. The fourth part hinges on sentimentalism. It is followed by the demise of Agnes and the author’s dinner conversation with a friend, Professor Avenarius bringing out the essence of Kundera’s art by tackling carnal issues of human identity. The next division titled the Dial presents a new character, Rubens, a former love-mate of Agnes. And finally, the seventh part, the Celebration winds up the narrative in the same spa where the author first saw ‘the inspirational wave gesture’ of Agnes.
It was a difficult book to translate. Nonetheless, the translator did succeed in his attempt by preserving the quintessential thread of the episodic narrative though the inter-textuality, as it were, of a different linguistic medium i.e., Urdu. Death and immortality ‘form an inseparable pair more perfect than Marx and Engels, Romeo and Juliet, Laurel and Hardy,’ as Kundera would view it. In the sub-plot, Goethe and Hemingway are shown debating in heaven when the former retorts to the latter’s quip that ‘Instead of reading my books, they’re writing books about me’: ‘That’s immortality’ which implies ‘eternal trial’.
Kundera is ostensibly inspired by the philosophy of Nietzsche and Cervantes. His intermingling of the lives and loves of multiple third person characters with that of his own dialogue in a non-chronological spatial outfit serves to conjoin fiction (Joycean, one would surmise!), poetry and magic. Immortality is the last of a trilogy that includes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
All said, popular fiction writer and translator Asim Butt’s positive opinion about the quality of translation in the instant work can hardly be gainsaid.
Burj-e-KhamoshaN
Author: Asad Muhammad Khan
Published by: Ilqa Publications, Main Boulevard, Gulberg II, Lahore
Pages: 104; Price: Rs150/-
Burj-e-KhamoshaN
Asad Muhammad Khan’s is now an established name in the world of Urdu fiction. The present collection contains eleven short stories moulded in an impressionistic design of Virginian complexity. The title is symbolic of the paradoxical inanity of speech in an environment charged with ignominy, violence, and deceit, to say the least. The ‘ivory tower’ of self-abdication, silence and solitude epitomizes the density, as also the profundity, of the substance of these stories.
Wit, conceit and irony are the constitutive elements of Asad’s style. Though he refrains from deriding individuals, his avowed target are the incongruities bedeviling our socio-cultural norms beyond repair and restoration. Asad toys with words; his diction is enviably variegated, and the dramatic texture of his satirical ‘outbursts’ is a treat to read and assimilate. His command of languages like English, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic and Persian lends a paradigmatic ambience to the fictional leitmotif of his stories.
Pun, parody, and innuendo characterize the syntactical composition of Asad’s fiction, his spasmodic quasi-misanthropic stance notwithstanding. Viewed in this context, Dr. Asif Farrukhi’s apt comment that Asad Muhammad Khan does not write stories in a straightforward manner, seems to hold water because of the enervating shadow of Intizar Hussain, as he thinks, on his style and fictional dynamics. Asad’s exploration of new vistas in fiction also culminated into his other classic story Tirlochan.
Metaphorically, therefore, Burj-e-KhamoshaN seems to be a ‘prosaic’ rendering of a shahr ashob (the tragedy of a city) mourning the death of human conscience on a macro level, and its ominous fall-out. Characters, situations, soliloquies, dialogues, monologues, and epilogues serve only as objective correlatives to the existential dilemma of life distancing itself from life situations as such ‘in favour of reflection on the creative process and critical self-examination’ which precipitates the transition of the post-modernistic text of Asad’s fiction into the metamorphic sphere of metaphysics.
Thus the readership of the book would seem to be manifestly constricted to the academic or intellectual elite conversant with the mechanics of a post-modernistic narrative. Borges’s (1899-1986) story would eventually be an apt epilogue to Asad Muhammad Khan’s multi-layered narrative.