The debut of a major new international literary talent is a rare and heartening event. THE WISH MAKER (Riverhead Books; Publication Date: June 11, 2009; ISBN: 978-1-59448-875-7; Price: $25.95), the first novel by twenty-four-year-old Ali Sethi, combines classic storytelling instincts, an eye-opening portrait of a suddenly important nation that Americans are intensely curious about, and a remarkable back story. THE WISH MAKER has already been highlighted in USA Today’s “Book Buzz” column and foreign rights have been sold in six countries to date. At once a fresh and affecting coming-of-age story, a riveting family saga, and a hip, witty social commentary, Sethi’s novel vividly evokes the pungent texture of daily life in his native Pakistan, particularly for women, as well as his country’s roiling social and political currents.
The son of prominent Pakistani journalists, Sethi went to Harvard University, where he studied with the novelists Zadie Smith and Amitav Ghosh as well as the critic James Wood. He has written in the Op Ed pages of The New York Times about Pakistan’s “slow-motion emergency,” which has led it to the brink of widespread violence and chaos, and more recently about the attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team.
In THE WISH MAKER, Sethi tells an intimate yet sweeping tale set mainly in the 1990s – a story of two cousins, a boy and girl, who grow up in the same household, unexpectedly follow very different paths, and reunite after a series of events that have irrevocably changed them and their country. It encompasses Benazir Bhutto, the heady promise of democracy, and the recurring nightmare of military intervention; Bollywood movie stars and American TV shows and the different kinds of forbidden love they inspire.
Sethi’s narrator, Zaki Shirazi, is a fatherless boy in a family of formidable and often clashing women. His shrewd and strong-willed grandmother, Daadi, is mystified by the behavior and opinions of Zaki’s widowed mother, Zakia. A liberal journalist and feminist, Zakia convenes gatherings of outspoken professional women in her home, takes her son to outlawed demonstrations, and is sometimes arrested for her stances. Zaki’s father, a debonair pilot in the Pakistani Air Force, was killed in a crash before he was born. Zaki recalls, “And so I came to be told, again and again, that I had been given to Daadi as compensation for the death of her son. ‘Remember,’ she would say, pointing a finger to the ceiling, ‘with one hand Allah takes and with the other He gives. You were given to us.’”
Zaki’s intimate companion is his slightly older cousin, Samar Api, who was sent to live with Zaki’s family in the relatively cosmopolitan city of Lahore in order to escape the feudal strictures of her wealthy father’s country village. Samar is a bright, spirited, and dramatic young girl, who confides her rapidly shifting passions to Zaki after making him “Godpromise” not to tell anyone. Obsessed with Indian films, Samar invites Zaki into her room, where they exuberantly reenact songs and dances they know by heart, and Samar convinces herself that she will one day be united with her favorite star.
Samar’s romantic fantasies edge closer to the realm of the actual when she befriends her schoolmate Tara Tanvir, an unstable mixture of worldliness, innocence, and guile – a “half-baked vixen,” as the Indian movie magazines would put it – who has lived in England and America. With Tara’s help and Zaki’s complicity, Samar arranges unchaperoned meetings – meetings which, if discovered, would be an extremely serious blot on a young girl’s character in Pakistan’s conservative Islamic society – with an older man with whom she claims to be in “El Oh Vee Eee”.
Meanwhile, Zaki watches The Wonder Years and zooms around Lahore in a beat-up car with his older male cousins Moosa and Isa, buying bootleg liquor (in a nation that officially bans all alcohol), and chatting with girls at Pizza Hut. As Zaki moves from Lahore’s leafy, upscale residential enclaves through the narrow lanes of the Old City (complete with a red-light quarter) and the gritty commercial districts, he is watched over by alluring billboard models holding cell phones, their eyes “enlarged with surprise and listening.”
When Samar’s unorthodox activities are discovered by her mother, she is punished severely and made to leave Lahore. And meanwhile, feeling the force of his own ambitions for the first time, Zaki attends first an elite private school and then after long months in a cram school, he is admitted to a college in Massachusetts (“a whisper-crunchy sound, like twigs snapping”). Zaki’s time there immerses him in American and international culture, altering his perspective on his family and country. As THE WISH MAKER begins, Zaki is returning to Pakistan for a wedding, where he sees Samar again for the first time in many years, and is prompted to consider the vastly divergent routes that have led them both back home.
A sweeping story of love, friendship, and the family ties that brings to life the turbulent world of modern Pakistan, THE WISH MAKER is also, as the title suggests, a meditation on the human capacity for wish-making, for wanting a richer and better life no matter one’s social status or age, and for recognizing the validity and power of that desire in others. In the tradition of such award-winning, bestselling Riverhead writers as Khaled Hosseini, Junot Díaz, and Chang-rae Lee, Sethi creates fully realized characters about whom readers come to care deeply, crafts enthralling stories with profound resonances, and brilliantly illuminates disparate cultures and the bridges between them. With THE WISH MAKER, Ali Sethi joins that select company, but with a voice, a gift for storytelling, and a wisdom beyond his years that are uniquely his own.
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June 29, 2009 at 2:38 am
[...] story. THE WISH MAKER has already been highlighted in USA Today’s “Book Buzz” column and fore Go to Source Leave a comment Related PostsJune 28, 2009 — US teenager Oudin stuns Jankovic (AP) (0)June [...]