Book Review | In Familiar Rooms, Fresh Wonders
The sentences in this novel are crafted with a surgeon’s hand. In some stretches, its bloodless proficiency reminded me of watching a football team coached by Pep Guardiola
Seventeen years ago, Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut short-story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, confirmed his place instantly in the firmament of Pakistani writing in English. Restrained, granular, yoked avowedly to the realism of the Russian writers he so adores, Mueenuddin’s stories drew the social and sexual lives of numerous characters living around a feudal estate in South Punjab — of drivers, cooks, maids and waiters, as well as the newer generation of westernised sahibs perched guiltily atop this violent table — with an acuity that is rare to find in most South Asian fiction.
Little was heard of his newer work in the years since, save for a story excerpted tantalisingly in The New Yorker, which duly appears here, in his first novel: a loosely connected set of interlocking novellas set between the seventies and the 2010s. The author himself was educated abroad and divides his time between Oslo and his family’s estate in rural Pakistan; much of the stories in both his works draw from his own life and history. On this evidence, it might not be long until we come to regard this period — Pakistan’s long feudal twilight — as positively Mueenuddinian.
His greatest trick here is in being able to unearth fresh psychological insight out of the otherwise familiar tangle of scheming munshis, ambitious servants and complacent Pakistani scions that populate his work. Characters bleed over from one story into the other. Most memorable is Yazid, an orphan off the streets of Rawalpindi who grows up through the ferment of the early Bhutto years to become a hulking chauffeur to an army colonel. Mueenuddin draws him as a portrait of tightly coiled desire and unyielding loyalty within a cast of characters who play fast and loose with both. His is the pulse of this novel, his shadow playing across the pages even when he disappears for long stretches of the story. Later in the novel, Yazid will go on to mentor a sharp young servant-boy called Saqib, who charms his way into his employers’ graces before growing gradually covetous of the lives unfolding before him.
Mueenuddin handles his rich and poor characters with an equal delicacy, though finds more room to work with, new layers of meaning within this psychodrama of repressed Pakistani masculinity, when it comes to the elite. In ‘Muscle’, a young man not unlike the author himself returns from abroad with ambitions to benevolently preside over his family’s estate until fate forces him to reckon with a rapidly changing balance of power, sharks circling round.
The sentences in this novel are crafted with a surgeon’s hand. In some stretches, its bloodless proficiency reminded me of watching a football team coached by Pep Guardiola; I came to treasure the moments he allows himself some mischief.
Yet above all, This is Where the Serpent Lives confirms the excitement that has followed its publication: an immensely readable novel of unsentimental brilliance, consistently simmering with danger and narrative possibility, which marks a distinctive stylistic standard in South Asian fiction. Another novel, reported to have been shelved after a decade of work, is rumoured to be in revival. We pray he makes haste.
This is Where the Serpent Lives
By Daniyal Mueenuddin
Penguin
pp. 352; Rs 799/-