In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Is it enough to take a literary style already heartily employed elsewhere and transplant it to a new country and culture to create a great literary movement? I would argue it is not, and further, that much of the praise heaped upon Daniyal Mueenuddin's collection of short stories indicates wonder at what he has done, rather than true literary merit.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a series of short stories that all feature in some way or other the Harouni family. Sometimes it is K. K. Harouni, a rich businessman, who appears, but as often the stories detail the lives of various of his servants and retainers in and around Lahore. In other stories, like Our Lady of Paris or A Spoiled Man, we deal with relatives of the powerful K. K., lesser Harounis as it were. But such a style, of repeating characters and stories that seem to orbit a central theme or hint at a fully fleshed-out imagined world, is one that America has been familiar with from at least Salinger, while one might argue that as early as Vergil were writers playing with hinting at presences beyond the text, as Vergil himself does in the Eclogues. That is to say, Mueenuddin is not innovating in giving us a series of Pakistani stories all featuring the same interwoven characters, present and absent.


Nor is he innovating in setting those stories primarily in Pakistan. Again, much of the hype surrounding the book comes from readers' excitement in recognising a foreign place or way of life succinctly expressed in literature. But Mueenuddin is not the first to write about Pakistan, nor should he be praised only because his theme is Pakistan. In fact, if the only literary merit of a piece is that it describes a place rarely described, we are considering a travel guide over a work of literary merit.


These two problems in early comments on In Other Rooms, Other Wonders would not trouble me so much if the writing itself stood up to close scrutiny. Unfortunately it does not. After a rather insipid opening story, in which I believe we are meant to be shocked, while I hardly stirred, Mueenuddin draws us at a laborious pace through a host of self-obsessed, self-serving characters who can barely see beyond themselves, yet alone their own horizons. Perhaps there is truth in such a depiction, in the way in which a more feudal society can impose stronger restrictions on its occupants' dreams and aspirations. Yet Mueenuddin labours the point, just like he labours his characters. Nothing is left to the imagination; nothing is intimated or expressed without it being made explicit. Time and again the delicately expressed moments in an individual story that might have charmed me were then brusquely explained and pored over, leaving nothing left for me to ponder myself. Even Lily, my favourite story of the collection, is brought to an appallingly tedious conclusion by the unwavering pace of the writing.

I fear I am falling into the same trap; Mueenuddin's ideas are there, and many of them are engaging. But the writing cries out for an editor, internal or otherwise, to prune back some of the verbosity that dogs and overwhelms what could be handled beautifully and delicately.

~~~

2009

Daniyal Mueenuddin

Random House, India