Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Abstract

66 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews had been believed, fought for . . . every day degenerates.” As a great admirer of Gordimer’s fiction and the high standards she sets for her art and her intellect, I am saddened to report that this latest novel disappoints. Gordimer’s fiction typically challenges and rewards with its crisp, taut style, elliptical expressions , and nuanced meditations on moral and ethical dilemmas. Here, however, the style plods, plagued by idiosyncrasies, chief among them a tendency to punctuate questions with periods and statements with question marks, an overreliance on em dashes to fracture sentence structure , and irregular constructions. While such irregularities could conceivably serve the thematic development of the novel, in this case they distract from what is probing and insightful in Gordimer’s disillusionment with the new dispensation in South Africa. Jim Hannan Le Moyne College Mohammed Hanif. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. New York. Knopf. 2012. isbn 9780307958310 In his second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Mohammed Hanif explores the relationships among caste, gender , and religion in modern Pakistan through his protagonist, Alice Bhatti. Alice is a Catholic nurse at a corrupt and crumbling Karachi hospital, Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments , and the daughter of a Catholic chuhra who travels the city curing ulcers by reciting Muslim prayers when he is not cleaning the sewers as a lower-caste worker. In coming to work as a junior nurse at the hospital , Alice seeks to surmount her caste and religious identity and find fulfillment through honest work. However, at every turn of the novel Alice is confronted with the corruption and perversion that is indicative of Pakistani life today. While treating VIP patients, Alice is molested by the patients’ visiting relations. In seeking love, she finds herself married to a thug-for-hire of the local police, Teddy, who disappears for days at a time with his work. Even in his deep love for Alice, SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 67 David Dabydeen Pak’s Britannica Lynne Macedo, ed. University of the West Indies Press A celebrated Caribbean writer and professor, Dabydeen has tackled issues ranging from slavery to Shakespeare, always with an unapologetic eye to the marginalization of black culture. A collection of essays and interviews, Pak’s Britannia is the first book devoted exclusively to Dabydeen’s academic work. Roser Caminals The Street of the Three Beds University Press of the South A rich heir seeks to understand the disappearance of his seamstress mistress. Set in late-nineteenth-century Barcelona, The Street of the Three Beds explores the connections between the city’s prosperous elite and its seedy underside. Originally written in Catalan, it is now also available in Spanish and English. Nota Bene Teddy must give way to the perverse speculation and advice of his crooked superior, Inspector Malangi. When paired with the advice on marriage that Alice receives from her superior , Sister Hina Alvi, the couple falls, powerless, into a trap of distrust. As if trying to work a thankless job and balance an unstable marriage to a Muslim man she hardly knows were not difficult enough, Alice finds herself suddenly engulfed in acts of divine intervention at the Sacred Heart. It is through the juxtaposition of human baseness and seemingly miraculous events that Hanif weaves his tale, thus exploring the bounds of humanity at both ends, in depravity and in divinity. With a profession of love at gunpoint, a man severing his own thumb, and a laborious stillbirth, this novel is not for the faint of heart. The action of the novel steamrolls through to the end, thus keeping readers engaged through the last page, even if the novel does seem to end a bit abruptly. Once the action of the novel is concluded, Hanif includes a letter from Alice’s father that calls into question the nature of Alice as a person, a nurse, and a wife. Much like E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Hanif ends the novel with more ambiguity over the very questions he begins with—namely, what roles truth and order have in current Pakistani life and whether or not Catholic and Muslim relations can find common ground. Although the novel does not conclude as...