Male fantasy
Serious writers, despite their flaws and flawed works, engage with and reflect the psychology of their time and place
By Moazzam Sheikh
The Humbling
By Philip Roth
Publisher: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.
Pages: 140 pages
Price: $22
In Fellini's semi-autobiographical film 8 fi, a successful film director, Guido Anselmi (played by the legendry Marcello Mastroianni), suddenly suffers from lack of inspiration and vision. The film within the film deals with science fiction, Catholicism and the Guido's personal life. As the pressure to shoot the film builds courtesy of his mistress, wife, producer and others, he checks himself into a spa to recover and collect his thoughts. In a similar vein, Philip Roth's protagonist, Simon Axler (a famed stage actor), suddenly can't act, "the impulse spent… Going on stage became agony." After being unable to help him through, his wife of many years, Victoria can't bear to see him crumble and leaves for California.

Zia Mohyeddin column
Nonsense verseI was being driven on the day of Ashura when I heard of the carnage in Karachi. The man driving me was quick to assure me that the Americans were behind the incident. "The Taliban cannot perform such a deed," he said.

It was a year of good books. It was also a year of some outrageously bad writing that should probably have never seen the light of day had Pakistan been just another country on the map. In 2009, publishers set loose a flurry of fiction books by local authors written in English on a worldwide audience. Some of the books were moving and eloquent, others were read once and forgotten about, resigned to a life amidst dust at the bottom of the pile.

And even though 2009 didn't start (or end, for that matter) well for the country and its citizens, it began on a great note for book aficionados, with the release of Daniyal Mueenuddin's stunning debut, the short story collection titled In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. At the time of its review, TNS said "Daniyal's book is a cornucopia of vivid characters, some rich, some poor, some educated, some not-but all these characters have lives that would make one burn with jealousy at the richness of their experiences." The short stories, revolving around K. K Harouni, his family and acquaintances, were beautifully written, evoking both sympathy and shock at the characters and their doings. A year later, one can easily say that Mueenuddin's book is one of the best that have been written in English by local authors this year.

Another debut novel this year was Ali Sethi's The Wishmaker. Despite being billed as the next Kite Runner, The Wishmaker's storyline and its characters failed to make an impression, and seemed rather half-baked. The Wishmaker is the story of a young boy, Zaki Shirazi, growing up in Lahore with his widowed mother, a cantankerous grandmother and a cousin, who frankly speaking, one just wanted to smack. Sadly, it was a case of trying to take on too much at one time; Sethi wastes many a word trying to cram in life in the Zia era, the problems faced by Shirazi's mother, who works as a journalist, the pitfalls of growing up in a conservative society and adjusting to life in Lahore after years spent as a student in the United States. Sounds like a mouthful? It is, but sadly a half-baked one that takes a long time to digest. Nevertheless, Sethi must be commended on his effort to do what many before him have failed to, and actually write and publish his book. With time, one has faith that he will get better, and perhaps produce more effective prose.

Kamila Shamsie made a return to the literary scene after an absence of four years with her widely acclaimed novel Burnt Shadows. Spanning Karachi, Delhi, Nagasaki and Guantanamo Bay, the book was nominated for the coveted Orange Prize. Speaking to TNS earlier this year, Shamsie said she "was starting a new chapter" when she took an 18-month break from writing before beginning work on Burnt Shadows.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi, who had previously translated the epic Amir Hamza into English a few years ago, impressed readers with his rather charming The Story of a Widow. Centring around a widow and her life and colourful family members in Karachi, the book reminded one of a time, when neighbours were one's best friends, society had its own rules, and the wills and whims of relatives were of paramount importance. Farooqi's depiction of the delightful and naïve Mona, who one warmed up to over the course of the book, enlivens the reader with the simplicity of the tone.

Soon after The Story of a Widow's release, the first volume of Farooqi's translation of the magical fantasy epic Hoshruba was released worldwide. In translating Hoshruba, Farooqi has helped ensure a new generation of Pakistanis are introduced to classics, and perhaps, we suspect, weaned away from their diet of Harry Potter and Twilight.

H.M Naqvi's Homeboy, released in the latter half of the year, is a contemporary take on the classic immigrant novel. A thoroughly entertaining debut, H. M Naqvi's brisk, sardonic writing style captures the new voice of the new global generation who belong everywhere. His New York is a cosmopolitan place, which rejects him following the events of 9/11, an event which creates categories that didn't exist before. Homeboy is a pleasant antidote to Papaya and grandmother novels that have provided the bulk of too much substandard South Asian fiction for the last few years.

In non-fiction, quite a few books were written about Pakistan; journalist Nicholas Schmidle's To Live or to Perish Forever was a great collection of reportage from Pakistan. Imtiaz Gul's The Al-Qaeda Connection researches the key characters from Pakistan in the global 'war against terror'. Christopher Sandford wrote a biography of the icon Imran Khan that made headlines for alleging that Khan's mother had considered the late Benazir Bhutto as a prospective match for the cricketing idol. Aatish Taseer in Stranger to History tried to write about finding God, attempts at reconciling with his father Salman Taseer (currently Governor of Punjab) and life in Pakistan, and bored readers to death within 10 pages of the opening chapter. William Dalrymple waxed lyrical about the Lal Pari from Sehwan Sharif, and the dangers of extremist Muslims targeting shrines of saints in the country in Nine Lives. Former BJP politician Jaswant Singh made Jinnah a hero, as did Asif Noorani with the cricketer Shahid Afridi.

In 2010, one expects to see Fatima Bhutto's Songs of Blood and Sword, and Guardian reporter Declan Walsh's Insh'Allah Nation: A Journey through Modern Pakistan, amongst others. Readers, hold on to your bookmarks.

Huma Imtiaz works as a journalist in Pakistan and can be reached at huma.imtiaz@gmail.com

Male fantasy

The Humbling

By Philip Roth

Publisher: Houghton

Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Pages: 140 pages

Price: $22

In Fellini's semi-autobiographical film 8 fi, a successful film director, Guido Anselmi (played by the legendry Marcello Mastroianni), suddenly suffers from lack of inspiration and vision. The film within the film deals with science fiction, Catholicism and the Guido's personal life. As the pressure to shoot the film builds courtesy of his mistress, wife, producer and others, he checks himself into a spa to recover and collect his thoughts. In a similar vein, Philip Roth's protagonist, Simon Axler (a famed stage actor), suddenly can't act, "the impulse spent… Going on stage became agony." After being unable to help him through, his wife of many years, Victoria can't bear to see him crumble and leaves for California.

Victoria, with three marriages, two divorces and a son to her credit, used to be a dancer when our famed actor fell in love with her and the grace with which she danced. As his acting, audience and wife bid farewell, he checks himself into a psychiatric ward -- instead of a spa -- for 26 days because finding himself alone in the house he felt "terrified of killing himself".

At Hammerton, the psychiatric hospital, Simon befriends another patient, Sybil Van Buren, whose reason for being there has to do with her having caught her current husband molesting her 8 year old daughter (from her previous marriage) but unable to make him admit. And now she is here helpless and unable to protect her child and her husband is at home with her children. She's willing to pay Simon if he'd agreed to kill the man. Simon declines. Later, one day, Simon would read in the paper that a woman named Sybil Van Buren had killed her husband, point blank, two shots, after getting divorced. But the real story has just begun.

Pegeen Mike Flaherty, the daughter of two small time actors who had known Simon in his early days, pays him a visit. Pegeen, an academic, hasn't slept with a man since her college days. She is 40 and a lesbian. Her long time lover has decided to take hormonal shots and become a man. Devastated, Pegeen moves to another town and gets a job as a lecturer after sleeping with Dean, another woman, a possessive lover. Somehow all this has contributed to her ending up with a desire to sleep with a man.

Things take off marvellously, despite opposition from her parents whose main concern is the age difference between the two lovers. Our narrator teaches her new things and as it turns out she's a good learner. But life being life, their relationship turns sour and though Roth doesn't spell it out, Pegeen begins to act withdrawn and cold, signalling the end of the relationship. With Pegeen gone, Simon feels abandoned, terribly depressed.

American novelist Kathryn Harrison, while reviewing The Humbling, took Mr. Roth to task for creating a demeaning Pegeen character, "made complicit in a vision that doesn't allow" her nothing but "a collection of clichés." According to Ms. Harrison, Roth, in The Humbling, is "unable to resist exploring every tired male fantasy". While this reviewer too is unimpressed with Roth's sexist lens, and the self-absorbed narrator in The Humbling, it is important to analyse Roth's choice of Simon becoming unable to act. Serious writers, despite their flaws and flawed works, engage with and reflect the psychology of their time and place.

Unlike Guido Anselmi in, 8 fi, who reflects on his past, his childhood and loves, Simon Axler turns out to be -- more or less -- either incapable of or uninterested in reflecting. An actor suddenly deprived of his talent he has honed for several decades an amazing metaphor but it is -- in a sense -- diametrically opposite to what grips Guido for one receives the direction and the other gives it. The one giving the direction struggles with the dilemma whether or not to tell a lie about his life on the screen. Whereas the one receiving the direction has no such compulsion as his role is to play the roles written by various playwrights. Any similarity Roth concocts between the protagonist of The Humbling and roles in famous plays, especially with regards to suicide, is stretching the reader's empathy. It would've been interesting if Roth were making a subtly political, and intellectual, point about masks that countries, corporations and other power structures have to wear in order to hide their sinister and unlawful behaviour and show a parallel with a famous actor's talent to make the audience believe in his performance. The reader, then, could've connected the dots, that the mask eventually falls off the face, lies emerge, and all folly and corruption is laid bare. But Roth keeps the novel personal, a one-man saga, where even women when they are allowed limited agency adamantly behave, both in love and war, in manly fashion.

In theorising his concept of the unity of being, the great Ibn Arabi elaborated on the desire for self-manifestation of the divine, which would've remained hidden forever. This being is essentially undivided. (Desire complicates everything, we know, we know!) Ibn Arabi distinguished between the hidden aspect of this being, which is unknowable and lacks description, and the aspect of being lord through which God enters into relationship with the world and becomes an object of worship. Novelists too suffer, it seems, from the desire to create a fictional world and be adored. But their main covenant is to offer a social critique while creating a work of aesthetic beauty, not blatant self-manifestation though it cannot be completely negated. Self adoration should not be the main character of a novel. Once this balance is disrupted, the novel and the novelist lose dignity. Novelists being human should be humble. Otherwise they may come across as indulging in onimism.

Moazzam Sheikh can be reached at alifms@jps.net

Zia Mohyeddin column

Nonsense verseI was being driven on the day of Ashura when I heard of the carnage in Karachi. The man driving me was quick to assure me that the Americans were behind the incident. "The Taliban cannot perform such a deed," he said.

Only a week ago, a columnist in this newspaper noted how ironic it was that even when the TTP accepts full responsibility for a gruesome suicide bombing (now a daily occurrence) some high-ranking spokesmen of the state declare that they suspect a foreign hand, implying that the Taliban are controlled by India and Israel. Judging from the pronouncements of the religious parties, it is the USA which is masterminding the entire operation.

Not a day goes by without a statement like:

"We shall leave no stone unturned to trounce the nefarious designs of the foreign powers that are intent upon destabilising our democratic march."

This is a literal translation. There are other similar utterances which have a greater share of overused clichés.

The unending tirade of misused and overused words which are churned out every day in the name of honour, valour and glory has a trite, hollow ring to it. I am reminded of that marvellous passage from The Hunting of The Snack by Lewis Carroll and I quote a few lines not for those they are aimed at (they never take any notice) but for those who relish nonsense poetry:

'To the horror of all those who

were present that day

He uprose in full evening dress

And with senseless grimaces

endeavored to say

What his tongue could no longer express

Down he sank in his chair – ran

his hands through his hair

And chanted in mimsiest tones

Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity

While he rattled a couple of bones."

Our delight in nonsense has its roots in childhood when we string words together without having to bother about their meanings and implications. "Akkar Bakkar, Bumbay Bau. Ikee Nabbay Porray Sau." I remember chanting this rhyming slang while running aimlessly when I was four or five years old.

My father, in one of his amicable moods, once told me the story of a Maharjah who was so lazy that when the was requested to "uchro" (say something), replied, "uchro,muchro, duchro". It delighted me no end. The words were a perfect release from the constraints of an incomprehensible world. Why hadn't I washed my hands? Why was I wrestling with the branch of a tree? Why was I not sitting down to learn my tables? The answer, of course, was "uchro muchro duchro". It was a scrumptious way of showing defiance to the censuring by an adult. More often than not, I had my ears boxed.

Poetry -- and the theatre -- has, in an increasing manner, given room to that liberation through nonsense which the grim, unrelenting, hide-bound world would not admit in any guise. Nonsense verse gives us a powerful release form the strictures of prudery and sanctimoniousness.

A surprising member of major poets, Samuel Johnson and Keats among them, has found an outlet in nonsense verse. (Most of our eminent poets sought release, not in nonsense verse, but in pornographic verse which was never published but handed down from generation to generation).

The literature of verbal nonsense goes beyond what we know as sense and restrictions. It transcends the limits of language and logic and it sharply brings into focus the human condition itself. This is what gives it a dimension larger than mere playfulness. It challenges the arbitrariness of a world determined by the propriety of logic. It describes the human condition in language so extravagant that it transcends

the relative poverty of the real world:

"like to the mowing tones of unspoken speeches

or like two lobsters clad in logic breeches

or like the moondcalf in a slipshod hat

or like the shadow when the sun is gone."

The desire to grasp the shadow when the "sun is gone," or to hear the tones of unspoken speeches of mankind, lies behind the impulse to speak nonsense. The real world is harsh and cruel; its inhabitants are crushed by prejudice, injustice, poverty, cruelty or accidents of birth and environment and they are unable to break the pattern ordained for them. In the simplest language, Edward Lear says:

"There was an old man of Cape Horn

Who wished he had never been born

So he sat on a chair , till he died of despair

That dolorous man of Cape Horn."

The 19th century poet, Edward Lear, is one of the most celebrated writers of nonsense verse. He was a naturalist. His Nonsense Botany has flower like Trikia Orologica (with blossom in the form of pocket watches) or Shoebootia Utilis (which grows shoes and boots). He also invented unheard of creatures which receive their existence from their names.

My favorite Lear poem is "Younghy Bonghy-Bo," a magnificent creation of fantasy. Younghy Bonghy-Bo inhabits the coast of Cormandel where "the early pumpkins blow." He proposes to Lady Jingly because "he is tired of living singly." Lady Jingly turns down his proposal because she is already committed to "Handel Jones Esquire and Co." Heartbroken, Younghy Bounghy-Bo bids her farewell and goes away to his death through the silent roaring ocean. Lady Jingly stays on the coast of Coromandel and "On that heap of stones she mourns" for the Younghy Bonghy-Bo . Cruelty and tenderness are closely linked in the verse of Edward Lear.

It is not surprising that Lewis Carroll the author of the immortal 'Alice' books was a logician. He was a man steeped in syllogisms and postulates, in which determination of meaning could not be shaken off. Perhaps this is why he created characters who did.

"When I use a word", Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "It means

Just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "Whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty,"Which is master – that's all".

The field of nonsense poetry -- and prose -- is as large as it is fluid. I admire it hugely because it debunks cant and hypocrisy and high moral exhortations; it portrays a sense of the senselessness of life, the devaluation of ideals and the hollowness of 'the stuffed men'.

I am not denying that there have been excellent works of literature in which the outward garb of purity and the high moral tone adopted by people in power has been ridiculed and mocked with brilliant effect, but they cannot match the brevity and alacrity of a limerick by Lear:

"There was an old Person of Buda

Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder

Till at last, with a hammer they silenced his clamour

By smashing that Person of Buda."