Volume 55, Number 16 · October 23, 2008
From a Mansion Near Tora Bora
By Pankaj Mishra
The Wasted Vigil
by Nadeem Aslam
Knopf, 320 pp., $25.00
All great events—wars, revolutions, economic disasters—impose a new conception of reality on their survivors, and it was clear soon after the attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001 that the abrupt and radical reconfiguration of social and political forces would also challenge novelists, exerting new pressure on the delicate art form of the realist novel. Ian McEwan was not alone in thinking that 'we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.' Not only did the scale of the atrocity, and the malevolence behind it, dwarf the most capacious imagination. It shattered the respite from large-scale violence and chaos that the West had enjoyed following World War II and then the Vietnam War, a period of peace and affluence which, though menaced by nuclear war, allowed novelists to imagine themselves working within relatively stable and self-contained bourgeois societies.
Review, 3413 words
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