Nadeem Aslam

This book is about five very different characters who come together in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks. There's Marcus, an English doctor who married an Afghani, converting to become a Muslim to do so. She is now dead, killed by the regime. There's Lara, a Russian, trying to discover the fate of her brother. There's Casa, a zealous Muslim jihadist. There's David, an American ex-CIA agent is looking for his son - once he was in love with Marcus' daughter. And there's James, US Special Forces, working against terror in Afghanistan. This disparate band all find themselves living for a while in Marcus house, and we learn to have sympathy with each of them. We learn of the sights, sounds and smells of an Afghanistan which remains beautiful through all the privations and sufferings of war and a punishing regime.

This is a novel to experience rather than simply to read. Its style is poetic, and brings to life the day-to-day reality of harsh and often brutalised lives. I didn't quite believe in the situation which brought these five characters together, but it didn't matter. The story is powerful and affecting in any case.… (mais)

A very angry novel, about a group of characters who find themselves caught up in multiple ways in the cycle of violence that dominates life in modern Pakistan. For Aslam, it seems to be a country where the military are in an unhealthily close relationship with the US, the police and judiciary are corrupt, violent and inefficient, and there is a general culture of Islamic paranoia that means that even the slightest perceived threat to orthodoxy — local or remote — is liable to provoke disproportionate official punishment, mob violence, and/or acts of terrorism.

The book seems to be conceived in a tragic, romantic mode, but Aslam’s characters are the victims of this endemic violence at so many different levels and from so many different directions in the course of the book that it almost becomes farcical, which surely isn’t what he intended. There are also some odd bookbinding choices going on: a book damaged by a brutal intelligence officer in the course of the story is being lovingly repaired by stitching the torn pages together with gold thread, in a sort of literary kintsugi. I can see the point, aesthetically, but I’m not sure that it would work mechanically, and there are far better ways to repair paper…

In the end I liked the general approach of the book, with its Rushdie-like conceit of “beauty vs. violence,” but I felt that Aslam undermined his case by piling too much miscellaneous bad stuff onto too small a group of characters.… (mais)

Strange: Determined to make a bit of space on the A shelf, I picked up this novel with fond memories of British-Pakistani Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. But now, having read The Golden Legend (2017) I've checked my reading journal and realised that I must have confused Maps for Lost Lovers with something else. Like The Golden Legend, Maps for Lost Lovers was very well-written and perhaps it was an authentic portrait of Pakistani immigrants who despise the country that's hosting them while they make money, but I did not enjoy reading it and I found The Golden Legend very confronting as well. My reading journal tells me that I didn't much like The Wasted Vigil (2008) either, but I'd forgotten reading it, so I don't think I'll be revisiting this author's work again.

He seems to have made a career out of writing about dysfunctional Islam. Maps is about an immigrant Pakistani community in England; Vigil is about Islam in Afghanistan, and The Golden Legend is about terrorism, cruelty, corruption and sectarianism in Pakistan. There is also love across religious divides in Aslam's fictional city of Zamaran, but as the novel traces the ill-fortune of Nargis after her husband Massud is killed in a terrorist attack, it portrays a culture of inescapable violence and intimidation.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/01/31/the-golden-legend-by-nadeem-aslam/… (mais)