Word: pakistanis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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These are prolific, topical times for Pakistani fiction. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, published in early 2007, was the first of the recent bloom. Hamid's unnerving novella, about a Princeton grad who grows a beard, quits his fancy New York consulting job and 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...
...describes everything from the "mewl of bargainers" at a fabric shop to card games played by bored guards at gated homes like the one in which middle-class narrator Zaki Shirazi lives. Also in the house are three related women whose lives mirror the tottering arc of recent Pakistani history - from partition to the bruised Bhutto years, caught between purdah and leggy Jane Fonda workout tapes, Suzuki Swifts and donkey carts. They are Zaki's grasping grandmother Daadi; his widowed mom Zakia, editor of a progressive women's magazine that criticizes the government and runs interviews with acid-attack victims...
...colonial Britain - its Karachi-born taxi drivers, jack-booted skinheads, coked-up admen and firebrand mullahs. His latest work, now playing at London's National Theatre, dramatizes his 1993 novel The Black Album. Set in 1989, during the furor over Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, it follows a British Pakistani college boy torn between the delights of sex and Western culture and the lure of Islamic fundamentalism. The book is a fresh and funny bildungsroman, capturing an antic '80s London. Sadly the play is clunky and shallow, flattening its characters to the very stereotypes that Kureishi's better work...
Kureishi has been attracting controversy since his Oscar-nominated screenplay for 1985's My Beautiful Laundrette, about a young, gay British-Pakistani making it - and making out - in Thatcherite London. The discovery that he could shake things up was wonderfully liberating, particularly for the son of a Bombay intellectual stuck commuting from a dreary London suburb to work as a civil servant in the Pakistani embassy. "My parents' generation were immigrants, who nobody noticed, and who didn't want to be noticed," he says. "Then came my generation." The boy who was called "Pakistani Pete" by a teacher for whom...
...poor, in a church that tells the story of the city over the years. It anchors a neighborhood once known for crime and drugs and violence, now a fizzing mix of college kids and old Irish and new immigrants and young families and stores that offer "Indian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern, Asian, Spanish, and American Groceries." In the days before, many thousands had come to pay their respects...