|
2 debut collections of short stories to linger over during the
holidays from the dream-like and delicately limned on an imaginary
island to the gritty and futile in Pakistan’s feudal society.
Paul Yoon’s
Once the
Shore
is painted in the colors of earth and nature: granite, wood,
glass, ivory. A restrained, delicate palette. And even
though the stories span five decades on a fictional island, Solla,
in South Korea, there is a certain timelessness to the book.
One steps into it knowing that here, in the winter, the sun is
'the color of ivory.' That the night comes through the
window 'in the shape of a wing.' And even planes have
'wings
like glass, contrails like veins.' Yoon says the imaginary
location freed him and it seems appropriate that only the caves,
the sea, the landscape, Tamra Mountain, are the geography in this
book which has the quality of dream and cobweb. Everything
is held back - colors, emotions, actions - as he tells us about a
blue dress that disappears and reappears, war and its stories, an
AWOL Yankee, sea women…. We wished at times that he would
let go of all that beautiful reserve for just a passionate
second….but then, there is also much power in such restraint.
In Other
Rooms, Other Wonders
is harsher in contrast; Pakistani-American Daniyal Mueenuddin is
always yoked to the reality of his territory, the land, the old
feudal ways. Mueenuddin’s book, which was nominated
for a National Book Award, is all story. Style holds no
sway, one searches in vain for a glimpse of fleeting beauty, there
is no flash of finely-turned ankle beneath these soiled skirts.
Sentences are casual, thrown away carelessly, the walls of this
house are rather rough-hewn as he takes us from the glittering
drawing rooms of the wealthy to the seedy quarters of the
poor. His characters are schemers, always calculating, but
his own words are picked out without much thought. Mueenuddin is no
Flaubert searching for le mot juste – in Lily he
begins with heedless words: 'Lily had been to parties all
month, week, endlessly, drinking, rarely having dinner.' And there’s
always despair and futility in his Pakistan, love is never quite
love, corruption is the way of all things. He could break a
poet’s heart without even trying. Mueenuddin is a jaded
observer; this house is a world without hope, yet, and yet, what
sparkles are the human lives within, the eternal fascination of
the tale is what draws us in, keeps us eagerly turning the page
for the next story. And this is the book’s charm: this
Yale-educated lawyer has all the power of the village storyteller
squatting under the banyan tree. And we want to gather
around for more. Daniyal says that when he was a child on
his father’s farm in Pakistan, he was allowed to play with the
children of the villages and the servant folk and this is probably
where he picked up all that marvelous insight into other lives, the ability to write
about servants and industrialists, farm workers and society girls.
So a collection that is rarefied and refined, and another that is
rough and yet ever so readable - 2 wonderful books to
luxuriate in over the holidays....
Read:
Once the
Shore, Paul Yoon
Read:
In Other
Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Tags:
pakistan |
|
 |
