Perhaps beginnings are meant to be disorientating sometimes. For many pages of Mohammed Hanif’s second novel I cannot get my bearings and start to worry that, far from finding my way into the dense narrative, I am becoming more and more lost.
I fret about what the problem might be. Is it overwritten? The earthiness of the description of downtown Karachi is glorious, but I begin to panic that if there are many more phrases such as ‘breasts like abandoned puppies’ I will get squeamish and miss the point.
There are pages and pages where nearly everything is throbbing or sweating or getting punched, eaten, licked, raped or shot to pieces. There are a lot of blood, guts and fleshy bits. I can barely think for the din of hungry stomachs rumbling. If this were a film, there would be long lingering shots of the beads of sweat on people’s upper lips, as well as sudden, apparently deeply significant close-ups of sweaty armpits.
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