Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009
A Very Different Pakistan
By Caleb Crain
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Norton, 247 pp., $23.95
Stendhal once wrote that 'politics in a work of literature is like a gunshot in the middle of a concert, a crude thing and yet it's impossible to withhold one's attention.' His own example suggested that it was possible to reconcile the guns and the music—like the cannons in the 1812 Overture, perhaps—but it is not easy. Recent fiction in English set in Pakistan has had to face the challenge squarely, however. The rule of law has been violated there so often, and the public trust plundered so extensively, that the country's damaged political culture now taints much of private life.
Review, 2968 words
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