Word: mueenuddin
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...returns home to Lahore after 9/11, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Mohammed Hanif's 2008 novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, based on the 1988 plane crash that killed General Zia ul-Haq, was a finalist for the Guardian first-book award. And Daniyal Mueenuddin's superb In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a sage, Chekhovian collection of tales set in rural Punjab, has been wowing critics since publication in February. Ali Sethi's hefty novel The Wish Maker, set mostly in Lahore during the 1990s and early 2000s, is also certain to keep the critics talking...
...Pakistani civil servant and an American writer, Mueenuddin, 45, grew up in Lahore and Wisconsin and graduated from Dartmouth (where, he says, "I more or less passed as an American"). In 1987, at the request of his ailing father, he moved to the family property in southern Punjab to learn the business and try, if he could, to keep the land from slipping out of the family's hands. Seven years later, he returned to the States--this time for law school and a stint at a New York City firm--but after a few years, the farm...
...ease in both cultures (he speaks fluent Punjabi and Urdu), Mueenuddin writes with an understanding of the hierarchies and traditions of Pakistani life but also with an appreciation for what Western audiences know and, more likely, don't know about life in a country that features far more prominently in newspapers than on the fiction shelf. "I am deep in my heart apolitical in my writing," he says. "There are plenty of soapboxes one can stand upon, but one of them is not a short story." In the world of In Other Rooms, all politics is local: the never-ending...
...servants would never find another berth like this one, the gravity of the house, the gentleness of the master, the vast damp rooms, the slow lugubrious pace, the order within disorder." That generational shift, the breakdown of the feudal system into something recognizably modern but no less disorderly, gives Mueenuddin his subject...
...itself to bleak conclusions, at least to some Western eyes. In the final scene of "A Spoiled Man," the title character, a gardener's assistant much abused by fate, has died and been buried on his master's land, his tiny cabin picked clean of his possessions. But to Mueenuddin, who imbues this character with a strong sense of resignation and acceptance, it's not an unhappy ending. He sees it as somewhat hopeful. "This is a homeless, landless man who's been thrown out by his family and is bitter and hardened," he says of his creation...