I am currently reading this book. Interesting read..thought like sharing with you a few highlights: :~)
From the Publisher
When Darashikoh Shezad gets himself fired from his banking job in Lahore, he begins a decline that plummets the length of this sharply drawn, subversive tale. Before long, he can’t pay his bills, and along with his electricity he loses his toehold among Pakistan’s cell-phone-toting elite. As the jet set parties on behind high walls, Daru descends into drugs and dissolution. For good measure, he falls in love with the wife of his childhood friend and rival, Ozi–beautiful, restless Mumtaz, to whom he is drawn with the obsessive intensity of a moth circling a candle flame.
Desperate to reverse his fortunes, Daru embarks on a career in crime, taking as his partner Murad Badshah, the notorious rickshaw driver, populist, and pirate. When a long-planned heist goes awry, Daru finds himself on trial for a murder he may or may not have committed. The uncertainty of his fate mirrors that of his country, hyped on the prospect of becoming a nuclear player even as corruption drains its political will.
Fast-paced, unexpected, and unfailingly entertaining, Moth Smoke portrays a contemporary Pakistan far more vivid and disturbing than the exoticized images of South Asia familiar to the West. His debut novel establishes Mohsin Hamid as a writer of substance and imagination.
From The Critics
Sudip Bose
Indian writers of English prose are hot commodities these days, having plunged onto the Western literary scene like elephants into a placid pond. In India, the frenzy has caused a writing boom, inspired, perhaps, by the financial success of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But what about literary Pakistan? Fewer writers have emerged from there, and those who have are often overshadowed by, or lumped together with, their Indian counterparts. Though their voices are distinct, many Pakistani and Indian writers do share a concern for the defining moment in their nations’ histories: the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Mohsin Hamid’s bold and ironic first novel is set long after that seminal event, but in its evocation of the anxieties of modern Pakistani life, the legacies of Partition are everywhere apparent.
Moth Smoke is set in the summer of 1998, when Pakistan detonated its first nuclear weapons in an escalating test-for-test with India. Like the atoms that must be split for a fission bomb to explode, modern-day Lahore is itself divided: between old and new, rich and poor, conservative and liberal. Lost amid this fractured society is Daru, a young man fired from his job as a banker, whose two great passions are hash and his best friend Ozi’s wife, Mumtaz. Daru, an intellectual wastrel, has a kind of underworld existence; unable to afford electricity or air conditioning, he lives alone in sweltering darkness. Ozi and Mumtaz, in contrast, run with Lahore’s urban hip, the sushi-and-mobile-phone crowd.
We are told early on that Daru has killed a boy. But did he really do it? The discovery of the truth leads us along Daru’s downward flight from stability to desperation, from salaried banker to low-life addict. Daru is wracked by devastating hunger, for food and drugs as well as for the radiant Mumtaz. (Think Knut Hamsun writing Pakistani noir.) When Daru departs after a meal at his uncle’s house, he is consumed by the aroma of leftovers: “The smell makes me hungry even though I’ve just filled my stomach with as much as I thought it could hold…I wonder why my body has chosen this moment to give me such an appetite, when I can least afford it.” The food Daru has just consumed is a luxury beyond his means, as is Mumtaz, with her glamorous life of sleek cars and elite parties, though that doesn’t prevent him from pursuing her.
The book’s dominant image is of a moth circling a flame. In the darkness of evening, Daru watches the strange seduction played out: the moth “spinning around the candle in tighter revolutions,” attracted to the fire. Ignited, the moth is consumed. The lingering moth smoke reminds Daru of burning flesh – his own, for this Icarus ends up singed by his own irresistible attractions.
To tell Daru’s story, Hamid employs multiple narrators, each with a distinct voice, none entirely reliable. This variety is, to my taste, a flaw, since none of the others is as finely pitched as Daru’s tragic, ironic voice. When Daru isn’t speaking, the prose tends to the flamboyant, with overworked metaphors and relentless punning, adding up to a bad Salman Rushdie impersonation. All in all, though, Hamid has turned a beautiful trick: He has made an old formula – man, woman and cuckolded husband – into something fresh and luminous. Rather like a moth turned into a butterfly.
— Salon
Publishers Weekly
Hamid subjects contemporary Pakistan to fierce scrutiny in his first novel, tracing the downward spiral of Darashikoh “Daru” Shezad, a young man whose uneasy status on the fringes of the Lahore elite is imperiled when he is fired from his job at a bank. Daru owes both the job and his education to his best friend Ozi’s father, Khurram, a corrupt former official of one of the Pakistan regimes who has looked out for Daru ever since Daru’s father, an old army buddy of Khurram’s, died in the early '70s. As the story begins, Ozi has just returned from America, where he earned a college degree, with his wife, Mumtaz, and child. From the moment they meet, Daru and Mumtaz are drawn to each other. Mumtaz is fascinated by Daru’s air of suppressed violence, and Daru is intrigued by Mumtaz’s secret career as an investigative journalist; the two share a taste for recreational drugs, sex and sports. But their affair really begins after Daru witnesses Ozi, driving recklessly, mow down a teenage boy and flee the scene. Daru decides then that Ozi is morally bankrupt. But as Daru becomes more dependent on drugs, the arrogance he himself has absorbed from his upper-class upbringing stands out in stark contrast to his circumstances. Daru’s noirish, first-person account of his moral descent, culminating with murder, interweaves with chapters written in the distinctive voices of the other characters. One in particular comes vividly to life: Murad Badshah, a sort of Pakastani Falstaff, officially the head of a rickshaw company, but kept afloat by drug dealing and robbery. Hamid’s tale, played out against the background of Pakistan’s recent testing of a nuclear device, creates a powerful image of an insecure society toying with its own dissolution. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Set in Hamid’s native Lahore, Pakistan, this first novel provides a pitch-perfect tale of the destruction of a young man. Socialy unconnected, Daru loses his precarious footing among the respectably employed and falls into an abyss of emotional depression, moral turpitude, and criminal activity. He goes from bank employee to drug dealer to holdup man, while falling in love with Mumtaz, the journalist wife of Ozi, Daru’s boyhood best friend and rival. Ozi strips daru of his self-respect, and Mumtaz can never merely be Daru’s lover, for she is both liberated and besieged by her own moral ambiguity. With a sure hand, hamid paints Daru, Lahore, the weight of Western materialist values, and evolving and devolving friendships, giving us near-photographic realism softened by the shading influences of well-turned phrases. Moving quickly but inviting prolonged retrospection, this first novel lays bare a human core that festers in its own unremitting heat. Hamid is a writer to watch. For all public libraries.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA
The New Yorker
It’s Hamid’s achievement that we remained charmed by Daru throughout; the fast paced, intelligent narration pulls us, despite ourselves, into his spiralling wake.
Jhumpa Lahiri
[A] brisk, absorbing novel…Hamid steers us from start to finish with assurance and care.
—The New York Times Book Review
par yeh sach hai bibi! :halo:
The ‘courage’ part comes from the social pressures that do not allow painting of such bold canvasses for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Lagge samajh? :~)
Its only because of the lack of variety of such ‘cultural texts’ and the misinformedness of the western literary critics, that such literary pieces are able to create such a stir…
matti pao…