The Scatter Here is Too Great
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature
Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2014
The Scatter Here Is Too Great heralds a major new voice from Pakistan with a stunning debut - a novel told in a rich variety of distinctive voices that converge at a single horrific event: a bomb blast at a station in the heart of the city.
Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before the blast. His son, a wealthy middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father, struggles to find words.
In a style that is at once inventive and deeply moving, Tanweer reveals the pain, loneliness and longing of these characters and celebrates the power of the written word to heal individuals and communities plagued by violence. Elegantly weaving together a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too great is a love story written to Karachi - as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The edgy account of Karachi life given in Tanweer's stylish but flawed debut resembles a Pakistani La Ronde, so gracefully does the narrative waltz from one character's life to another. The difference here is that most of the people we meet are connected not by love, but by a bomb blast. In one of the best sections of the novel, an unnamed boy and his sister, Aapa, are sent to live with their grandmother. When Aapa's romance with a local boy is discovered, shame and calamity befalls the family. The narrative then jumps into the life of Sadeq, who is involved in the dangerous world of auto repossession and gradually revealed as Aapa's lover except the encounter that so disrupted her life is just a blip in his. Later, Tanweer follows Akbar, a young paramedic undergoing a spiritual crisis after witnessing the bombing. Although all the pieces fit, and many are beautifully written (the opening sequence, about a bus ride the boy and his father take to the seashore, is masterful), the overall thrust of the narrative is unclear. Nonetheless, this poetic novel-in-stories is an invaluable portrait of modern-day Karachi.