Word: mohsin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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These are prolific, topical times for Pakistani fiction. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, published in early 2007, was the first of the recent bloom. Hamid's unnerving novella, about a Princeton grad who grows a beard, quits his fancy New York consulting job and returns home to Lahore after 9/11, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Mohammed Hanif's 2008 novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, based on the 1988 plane crash that killed General Zia ul-Haq, was a finalist for the Guardian first-book award. And Daniyal Mueenuddin's superb In Other Rooms, Other Wonders...
...Moni Mohsin has been writing a column, narrated in the first-person voice of a pathologically shallow socialite called Butterfly, in the Friday Times of Lahore since the early 1990s. In her second book, The Diary of a Social Butterfly (the first, 2006's The End of Innocence, was a coming-of-age story set in West Punjab during the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971), she has culled columns spanning January 2001 to January 2008. The pieces are bookended by the flexing of Taliban muscles in Afghanistan and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto - and they constitute a hilarious social commentary...
...that emerges from Butterfly's solipsistic musing, but the book's greatest triumph is her voice, a pitch-perfect mixture of malaprop subcontinental English and the colloquial Urdu spoken by her class - perhaps the most authentic example of what Salman Rushdie has termed the "chutnification" of the English language. Mohsin's ear is preternaturally tuned to the exactness of its hilarious cadences, idiosyncrasies and reinventions ("bore-bore countries," "spoil spots," "what cheeks!"). There's hardly a sentence in the book that doesn't contain them...
...book is being talked of as a kind of subcontinental Bridget Jones's Diary but Mohsin's extraordinary achievement in exploiting the contrapuntal irony in the gap between the private and the public gives it a political depth that aligns it more closely to Rushdie's novel of Pakistan, Shame. This is a wildly entertaining anthology, but beware: it also bites...
...Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist