Tag-Archive for ◊ Pulitzer Prize ◊

Author:
• Saturday, April 30th, 2016

Daniyal Mueenuddin was born in 1963 from a Pakistani father and an American mother. His father and mother met in the USA in the late fifties. His mother was working as a reporter for The Washington Post and his father, a Pakistani civil servant, was posted to Washington for the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan brokered by the World Bank.

His parents moved to Pakistan soon after their marriage in 1960. Daniyal was brought up in Lahore where he attended the American School, but at the age of thirteen his parents separated and his mother returned to live in Elroy, Wisconsin and took him and his brother Tamur with her. Daniyal was enrolled in a boarding school in Massachusetts and after four years obtained a degree in English literature.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, after graduating from Dartmouth College and at his aged father’s insistence – his father, now in his late seventies, being a land owner from the old Punjabi feudal system – returned to Pakistan in 1987 in order to live on his father’s land in South Punjab to run the family farm efficiently.

In 1993 he returned to the USA, attended Yale Law School for three years, obtained a degree and worked as a corporate lawyer in a law firm in New York from 1998 to 2001. After resigning, he returned to live in Pakistan, dedicating his time to writing and managing the family farm in Khanpur. He still lives there with his Norwegian wife when he is not in Cairo.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Mueenuddin’s first book published in 2009, has been translated into several languages. It won the Story Prize in 2010, an annual book award for short story collections and he reached the finals for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Best First Book Award and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a collection of eight short stories interlaced around a central protagonist, the wealthy landlord K.K. Harouni. It also follows the life of his family, his friends, his entourage and his staff. One of the stories is set in Paris and as for the others, they are mainly set in South Punjab. They originate from the author’s experience as a land owner in this part of Pakistan and many of them were written on the spot. The stories portray colourfully rich characters from the late nineteen seventies and ending just before the new millennium.

The author depicts the privileged life of prosperous Pakistanis, in contrast to their poor peasants, servants, managers and clerks, the lack of job security and government corruption. In each story we invade the intimacy of a master or a subordinate, what the author metaphorically calls: “another room”, in order to discover a new aspect of someone’s life or perhaps even unearth: “another wonder”.

The first story is dedicated to the ambitious Nawabdin, an electrician, handyman and father of thirteen children. He works on the Harouni estate and after begging his employer he obtains his permission to buy a motorcycle which becomes his most priceless acquisition and makes him highly regarded in his entourage. Such a valuable motorcycle enhances his status to such an extent that he will try to save it with his own life from a desperate, destitute thief.

There is also the touching story of Rezak, in A Spoiled Man (the eighth and last story). The indigent peasant, Rezak, has been abandoned and badly treated by his own family. He is a happy-go-lucky hard-working man who, for no fault of his own, is being unfairly tortured and threatened by the corrupt police. This leaves him overwhelmed with sorrow, never to be the same man again and to think that what happened to him was meant for his redemption.

Nawabdin’s story is followed by the story of another servant, Saleema, a young maid working in the Harouni’s household. She is married to a weak and depraved man who takes a few rupees from her everyday to satisfy his addiction to amphetamines, while she sleeps with Hassan the cook in order to obtain favours but ends up falling in love with Rafik, an old married valet from the same household.

In another story, Husna, the poor young secretary, cum companion, cum mistress of the retired civil servant and well-to-do landowner, K.K. Harouni, who lives separated from his estranged wife, is like Saleema, also pinning her hopes on an old man in order to escape poverty and secure herself. The two women’s expectations are unfulfilled and they find themselves once more in the street after their employer dies.

In Provide, Provide, the author, moves one degree higher in rank with K.K. Harouni’s estates manager, the shrewd, Jaglani. He is a devious schemer who manages to sell some of Harouni’s land in Southern Punjab at half price to people around him, earning commissions on each sale and keeping the best pieces of land for himself, convincing Harouni that the price of land has gone down.

In About A Burning Girl, Mian Sarkar, a sessions judge in the Lahore High Court, is another interesting figure in Pakistani society. He has an ambitious, haughty wife and an unpleasant problem with his servant, Khadim, who is accused of having murdered his sister-in-law. Sarkar’s character is humorously illustrated as a well informed detective of trivia: “Everything about the private lives of the judges, and of the staff, down to the lowest sweeper, is to him incidental knowledge. He knows the verdicts of the cases before they have been written, before they even have been conceived”.

The author dedicates his longest story, Lily, to the spoiled, idle rich Pakistani society. His very pretty heroin, Lily, leads a debauched life, partying almost every evening, drinking alcohol, taking drugs and getting what she wants. In order to redeem herself, she marries the wealthy landowner, Murad Talwan, lives with him on his farm, but feels terribly bored because she misses her former life of partying, despite inviting friends to stay over.

In Our Lady In Paris, the author takes us to France’s capital city, Paris. Harouni’s nephew, Sohail, is in love with his Yale university friend, Helen. He introduces Helen to his parents while everybody is on holiday in Paris during the Christmas/New Year holidays to the dismay of his mother, who would have preferred a Pakistani wife for him. Surprisingly, in the last story: A Spoiled Man, Sohail Harouni is married to an American woman he met at University in the U.S.A called Sonya and not Helen. The mystery is unexplained in the novel.

There are several themes that occur throughout the novel, like the feudal system, the array of established social classes and their very different ways of leading their lives: the unfulfilled love, the unhappiness, the corruption, the helplessness of women who more often than not have to resort to sex for survival like: Saleema, Zainab or Husna and the destitution of the poor servants once the master dies. A good insight into the different social strata and its complexities in the modern Pakistan.

The bleakness of the stories, which are beautifully written with a great deal of observed detail, are softened by the author’s compassion for his characters, which can be read between the lines, similar to the shafts of light that pierce the dark gloom and are softened by some well-dispersed humour.

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Author:
• Saturday, March 03rd, 2007

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London in 1967 but moved to Rhode Island USA with her parents at the age of two. She received a B.A. in English literature from Barnard College, an M.A. in English from Boston University as well as an M.A. in Creative Writing, in comparative studies in literature and arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies. She taught creative writing at Boston university and the Rhode Island school of design.

Jhumpa Lahiri has written only two books to date: her short stories “Interpreter of Maladies” published in 1999. It became a best-seller in no time, was translated into 29 languages, and won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the first time to have been won by an Indian. She also won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Her second book “The Namesake”, published in 2003, is her first novel. The New Yorker has published two of her stories: “Nobody’s Business” in 2001 and “Hell and Heaven” in 2004. The New Yorker named her one of the 20 best writers under the age of 40.

Jhumpa Lahiri lives and works in Brooklyn with her Guatemalan American husband, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, who works as a deputy editor for the Time Latin America and their son Octavio. She was married in 2001. Her parents live three hours away from her home. Her father is a librarian and her mother a professor of Bengali. She also has a younger sister.

Her real name is Nilanjana Svdeshna. Jhumpa is her nick-name. “The Namesake” is being filmed and is to be released in 2006.

“The Namesake”, J.L.’s first novel, deals with more than one theme: the difficulty for immigrants to adapt to a new life far away from home, the clash between different cultures and the problem of integration. Ashoke and Ashima, newly married in Calcutta, move to Cambridge Massachusetts for Ashoke to continue his studies and obtain an MIT engineering degree. Ashoke is more supple and open-minded vis-à-vis the American way of life than his wife, Ashima who will never be able to accept this new culture thrust on her. During the 32 years from 1968 to 2000 we come across the struggle of the Bengali second generation immigrants and their search for identity.

Jhumpa Lahiri says in one of her interviews: “The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially so for those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case for their children. The older I get, the more I am aware that I have somehow inherited a sense of exile from my parents, even though in many ways I am so much more American than they are. In fact, it is still very hard to think of myself as an American. (This is of course complicated by the fact that I was born in London.) I think that for immigrants, the challenges of exile, the loneliness, the constant sense of alienantion, the knowledge of, and longing for a lost world, are more explicit and distressing than for their children. On the other hand, the problem for the children of immigrants – those with strong ties to their country of origin – is that they feel neither one thing nor the other. This has been my experience in any case.”

When asked which country was her motherland, JL replied: “None”, “No country is my motherland. I always find myself in exile in whichever country I travel to. That’s why I was always tempted to write something about those living their lives in exile”, she said.

Reading this would explain her deeply moving way of describing her characters and their various conflicts, especially the main character, Gogol, who had been given a nick-name – a Bengali tradition – which is neither Indian, nor American, and not even a first name but a Russian surname. He was named after the Russian writer, Nicolaï Gogol, his father’s favourite author and also rescuer from the train accident in India. People saw the father in the train’s wreckage thanks to the father holding Gogol’s collection of short stories. Gogol hated his nickname, which became his official name, and felt relieved to go and have it changed to Nikhil.

Jhumpa Lahiri says: “The original spark for the book was the fact that a friend of my cousin’s in India had the pet name, Gogol. I wanted to write about the pet name, good name distinction for a long time, and I know I needed the space of a novel to explore the idea.” The idea has been very well explored in depth in addition to the immigration/assimilation problem.

The description of the characters is quite detailed and charming, like Ashima’s examining her future husband’s shoes in the lobby of her parents’ house before walking into the sitting room.

Gogol grows up to be an intelligent, well educated man, but feels helplessly lost. He has a good, promising job and yet can’t find his way in life. He was born and grew up in America from Benghali parents with an odd name that he didn’t appreciate and which became his real name. He had a bad experience with an American young lady and a hurtful one from his Benghali wife, which led to divorce.

He is the main character in the book and the very touching one. Through Gogol we live the trials and tribulations of the Ganguli family. The style of the narration is elegant and so is the prose. All the events are described in great detail. Even the description of the different Indian dishes are mouth watering. It’s all very endearing and very life like.

Full circle is reached when Nikhil discovers among the books his mother piled in a box to give away to the library, the long forgotten volume that his father once gave him as a birthday present and which he never even looked at. Suddenly Nikhil felt the urge to discover “The Collection of Short Stories” by Nikolaï Gogol. Like his grandfather and his father before him, Nikhil has embarked on a new discovery.