The joy of brief encounters
Mastering the short story form is like performing a high-wire act. Tim Adams witnesses some audacious new performers
Tim Adams writing in The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009
Mastering the short story form is like performing a high-wire act. Tim Adams witnesses some audacious new performers
Tim Adams writing in The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin, Bloomsbury £14.99
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, Granta £10.99
Greenfly by Tom Lee, Harvill Secker £10.99
It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun, Jonathan Cape £16.99
There is always a loneliness to great short stories; they isolate individual lives and choices. We don't see characters in Chekhov's stories, or Raymond Carver's, as having an existence outside the claustrophobic confines of their few pages; we sense them, rather, as being pinned and trapped in the particular corners of a recognisable stylistic world, an instinctive moral universe, that their author had already made his own before they wandered in.
Daniyal Mueenuddin captures exactly that confinement in the title of his first collection of stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Bloomsbury £14.99). Each of the stories opens a door on to a life you had never expected, shines a light for a while and quietly closes the door again. In this, Mueenuddin follows Carver's maxim: "Get in. Get out again. Don't linger."
The author's biography - graduate of Yale Law School who "practised law in New York before returning to Khanpur, Pakistan, to manage the family farm" – also determines something of the size and shape of the house in which these rooms are located. 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. Each is linked in some way to a fictional Pakistani billionaire, KK Hourani, and each focuses on a singular life among his wider family or staff.
There are tremendous stories here and if they are not autobiographical, then they are all clearly grounded in lived experience. Each is linked in some way to a fictional Pakistani billionaire, KK Hourani, and each focuses on a singular life among his wider family or staff.
Read the full reviews online.
No comments:
Post a Comment