Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is much better so far than the dry, mannered stories excerpted in the New Yorker. His style is determinedly unflashy like Jhumpa Lahiri’s, but the feudal Pakistani context is not as familiar. He occasionally flexes his rhetorical muscles, and the results are reminiscent of Saleem Sinai:

So far as I am aware, Mian Sarkar wore a cheap three-piece suit and a pair of slightly tinted spectacles of an already outmoded design on the day that he emerged from his mother’s womb. When he leaves the office in the evening, exactly at five, he doesn’t turn a corner or get into a cab or a bus, he simply dematerializes… Before speaking he clears his throat with a little hum, as if pulling his voice box up from some depth where he secretes it for safekeeping. His greatest feature, however, is his nose, a fleshy tubular object, gorged with blood, which I have always longed to squeeze, expecting him to honk like a bus…

There is nothing connected with the courts of Lahore that he has not absorbed… He knows the verdicts of the cases before they have been written… He sees the city panoptically, simultaneously… This is the bacillus my wife sent to resolve Khadim’s case as she wanted it resolved. Mightier men than I feared him.

The author is scathing about the mentality of the upper class:

‘And what shall we do?’ …

‘Somebody murdered the poor woman… False or not, he’ll hang for it.’

‘No, no,’ she said… ‘Nonsense. Good servants are impossible to find.’

I’m reserving judgment until I finish the book, but so far he’s the best author I’ve read from Pakistan. On 2/25 he’s reading at City Lights Bookstore in SF. If you’re around, do come.

Related post: In other formats, other wonders