Intizar Husain (1923–2016)

Basti is a fictionalized retelling of much of the history of Pakistan in the twentieth century through the eyes of a teacher who, as a child, lived through the Partition of India and Pakistan in the 1950s, and who experiences the secession of Bangladesh in the 1970s as an adult. The word basti in Urdu means something like “settlement”, and it is through a sequence of villages and towns and cities and the sometimes coerced transitions between them that Husain builds up the plot to his fictionalized history of Pakistan.

On a more abstract level, much of the novel deals with questions of home, of belonging to a land (or the land), and it follows its narrator and his family and friends as they uproot themselves and are forced to move to new places where the tough and intricate business of creating a new home can always be disrupted as the political and religious winds change. Family ties weaken and friendships dissolve across sudden national borders, and the town that became so familiar when your own wave of immigration moved in may change again as the next one is forced through.

That is not to say that the book is not readable: it speeds along at a crisp enough pace, slowing down where necessary and moving towards associatively-connected dream time passages when that is called for. One of the things I’ll remember best about this novel, though, is just how densely the prose is spiced with quotes from and allusions to various poets and religious and mythological texts, from several languages and traditions (Urdu, Persian, Arabic) – references which the footnotes take pains to elucidate. The ending, particularly, appears to be Husain’s reworking of an intense amalgam of poems and lines from other sources (akin, I believe, to how Umberto Eco blent the Song of Solomon, among others, into his own prose for the sex scene in The name of the Rose). Knowing about the references, and especially knowing how frequent they are, adds to the sense that this novel is solidly anchored in a rich and interconnected literary tradition with tropes and techniques of its own.

There were things that did not work for me. For one thing, Husain didn’t always juggle the two timelines (1950s and 1970s) as smoothly as he could have. This was particularly noticeable towards the beginning of the novel, where a few brief cutaways to the later timeline were especially inelegant – nothing happened in them, they merely repeated prior cutaways, and they served quite transparently to signal to the reader that the later timeline was going to be important, just not at that moment. I don’t think the gears and joints of writing should be showing this much. For another, I don’t think the characterization worked out all that well: several of the narrator’s friends ended up too similar to each other and could easily have substituted for each other.

Reading Basti on its own is a bit of a challenge: unfamiliar as I am with Urdu literature, the dense allusions and the assumed familiarity with the history of Pakistan and Bangladesh threw me for a bit. But once I got into the movement of the prose, I was more than happy to be along for the ride. I now feel much better prepared to tackle more literary fiction from Pakistan!… (mehr)

I bought this book last year, early in my translated fiction kick, and I think it's easily one of the best books I found as a part of that interest.

It is also a difficult and challenging book to read. Zakir wanders between the events of his present day, reminiscing about the past, and then, as the book goes on, into dreams and visions, retellings of myths and history that blend into each other so seamlessly that you're not sure you've departed from the here and now until suddenly you're in a town where most of the inhabitants have been beheaded -- but they are still up and walking around and talking.

Adding to this complexity is that while most of the book is narrated by Zakir, not all of it is, and in conversation there are only the quotes, lacking the signifiers of who is speaking them, then the cultural/language difficulties of understanding nicknames and other naming conventions. There is a very helpful glossary, though, which I wish I'd discovered earlier in the book.

Despite these difficulties, it is the later parts of the novel, when the effects of war -- the uncertainties and suspense and unknowingness of war -- cause Zakir to stray more often and deeper into stories, myth, and metaphor, that I really fell in love with the book. And it makes a powerful argument for the humanities -- there are forces that, when you're living them, espeically, cannot be understood by science or journalism alone.

An amazing book.… (mehr)