In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Abstract

> H < ^1 ? I ^1 o H H * culminates in a display ofwhimsi cal cruelty against Bob H?p and his "wild boy," who are themselves no innocents. But then, individuals will run out of control once the system in which theyoperate escapes fromthe discipline of truthfulness. The island system also turns out to be immune topolitical influence and individual courage. It is controlled by a many tentacled entertainment industry, which corrupts all who feed on it and knows everything through its unsupervised use of surveillance. Although Barner egjeringen reaches out to earlier dystopian visions, from Brave New World and Lord of theFlies to Super-Cannes, its fast-flowing language, inventive ness, madly up-to-date social satire, and strong moral intent places it firmlywithin a group of contem porary Norwegian works of fiction, which includes Jan Kjaerstad's novel trilogyabout thehard lifeand times of the media-baron/victim Jonas Wergland, and Wonderhoy,Henrik Langeland's eager and knowing fantasy about a hyperactive young turk in the media business confront ing the old and elusive trade of book publishing. These are allwrit erswho mine a particularly fruitful seam of fiction for a weary postcapi talist world. Anna Paterson Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom Daniyal Mueenuddin. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. New York. W.W. Nor ton. 2009. 247 pages. $23.95. isbn978 0-393-06800-9 In his debut collection of short sto ries, Daniyal Mueenuddin keenly observes the subtleties of power. In each of these stories set in Paki stan, somebody needs something from someone else, as Mueenud din's characters work various forms of influence in pursuit of a desired end. Suggesting the uneasy juxta position of residual feudalism and modernity, Mueenuddin portrays an unequal social hierarchy marked by self-interest and corruption, in which characters depend upon the whim of other people for jobs, a place to live, social approval, and the calculated dispensation of love and sex. Even when a character secures patronage, things often go terribly awry. Harmless and gentle Rezak reports his wife missing and subse quently isabused by thepolice, who suspect that he has sold her into prostitution. With disheartening logic Rezak concludes that "when he lost the girl, their instruments punished him forhaving dared to reach so high, forowning something thatwould excite envy, thatplaced him in theway of beatings and the police. . . .This was how he under stood justice." Such poignant under statement expresses a motif of these stories:weak people suffer in spite of theirbest effortsto improve their lot in life, while thepowerful barely notice, or care, that their actions lead so precipitously to the demise of their subordinates. Always haunting Mueenud din's stories, sometimes glaring, sometimes oblique, is the specter of disappointed hopes and failed ambition. To retain her position, Saleema makes love with a much older household servant. "That was [their] marriage feast,drugged samosas, and she felt sad and worn and frightened."Hope and despair, cooperation and betrayal, tender ness and savage disregard for other human beings mark these stories, as Mueenuddin concisely and skillfully develops a rich social world com prised almost claustrophobically of close but seldom truly intimateper sonal relationships. "Her love affairs had been so plainly mercantile trans actions thatshe hadn't learned tobe H^H coquettish. But the littlehopeful girl in her awoke now." Readers will not see an indictment of social iniq uitywrit large in this collection, but Daniyal Mueenuddin does indeed take the measure of societyby show ing those moments when the fra gility of an individual's existence is made painfully and hopelessly unavoidable. Jim Hannan heMoyne College Maja Novak. The Feline Plague. Maja Visenjak-Limon, tr. Robert Buckeye, foreword. Berkeley, California. North Atlantic (Random House, distr.). 2009. x + 235 pages. $15.95. isbn978-1-55643 The moral of The Feline Plague is announced in the first chapter: "It is impossible to avoid an accident, but itnever comes in theway you have envisaged." The accident is the introductionof infectedcats into Slovenia, which kills not only all the cats but most other animals, includ ing humans, and the disappearance of Slovenia, "so that our language was never spoken again and we were never again spoken about"? not quite as disastrous as Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, as befits Slovenian modesty. After revealing the ending, the novel doubles back to introduce the main characters, if not ab ovo, then farback in theiruniformly lamen table histories. Ira, named for the goddess of anger, is the chief instru ment of the catastrophe. There is also a failed writer who abets her and thendisappears into thedesert, a pair of interchangeable twinswho alternate days atwork, and a blind woman painter who can read ordi nary text and describe more colors iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiimiim 68 i World Literature Today HHi ...