Book Review:

One of the things I enjoy most about reading fiction is the snap shots it can provide into other people's lives and cultures different from my own. I've recently finished reading Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a first collection of short stories all set in Pakistan. The opening story, "Nawabdin Electrician," was a selection for Best American Short Stories 2008, and the book itself was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. Little wonder, then, that I should both choose to read it and enjoy it.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the stories are connected through characters and specific settings, a sure positive for critics who nominate books for prizes, think Faulkner, Hemingway, Garcia-Marquez. But for me a serious part of the value of such a book is Mueenuddin's providing me with insightful snap shots into a culture and a place that I know little about.

The stories won't provide much background on current military action in Pakistan or the regions occupied by Al-Qaeda. Instead we are provided with a glimpse into the lives of the wealthy and those who wait on them, a sort of upstairs/downstairs vision of people in their daily lives, especially those of women. Domestic life and the struggle to survive and discover meaning to existence are central themes in the stories. Another is the constant state of negotiation. Note the following passage from the story, "About a Burning Girl":

When I returned punctually at five from the office, my wife called me into the living room, where she sat with an old lady, one of her projects, someone from whom she wanted something. Judging from the guest's enormous Land Cruiser parked in the veranda, she must be the wife of a big fish. This is the phrase; also a big gun. Imagine my wife as being the poor man's Lady Macbeth and you will have the entire picture.

Mueenuddin's characters are always making deals, and often the deals they make end up not serving them well. Readers will also note the fatalism throughout the strata of the culture he portrays. In all likelihood, it is this fatalism that most American readers will have the most difficulty with. Certainly it will not be the prose, which is as well crafted as that of anyone else writing in English today.