Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is the only one of Rushdie’s books which is set in Pakistan and it’s a political story. The protagonist is the Bhutto family. Benazir Bhutto features in it as this virgin smarty-pants. A lot of the stories in the book are actually true. For example, the description of relations among various members of the family and the descriptions of the corruption and bribes going on are all true. I was too young to remember all that, but my mother took great delight in the book because she lived through that era.
Your next book is Shame by Salman Rushdie, which was written after Midnight’s Children.
Yes. This is the only one of his books which is set in Pakistan and it’s a political story. The protagonist is the Bhutto family. Benazir Bhutto features in it as this virgin smarty-pants. A lot of the stories in the book are actually true. For example, the description of relations among various members of the family and the descriptions of the corruption and bribes going on are all true. I was too young to remember all that, but my mother took great delight in the book because she very much lived through that era. It’s a much harder book than other books that Rushdie has written. It’s less fantastical and a more vigorous book. It certainly describes the craziness of Pakistan in an accurate way. Again, it’s not prettied up.
Read full interviewDaniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope and The Best American Short Stories 2008 selected by Salman Rushdie. For a number of years he practised law in New York. He is based on his family’s farm in Pakistan’s southern Punjab – which inspired his collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – but is living in London for the next ten months while his wife pursues her graduate studies. Daniyal Mueenuddin talks to FiveBooks about the changing face of Pakistan.
Your next choice, Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame, is often described as a devastating political satire.
I have personal reasons for choosing this. It is the story of two men, two very powerful men. One is based on my grandfather, Pakistan’s former president and prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and the other is based on Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who was a military general who overthrew my grandfather and eventually killed him.
In Pakistan we are very quick to condemn Salman Rushdie’s books even if we have never read them and we tend to forget that actually he also has a history in Pakistan. His mother lived in Karachi and he himself spent time in Karachi. You have to remember that the country in the book is fiction but he describes Karachi in fiction like no other fiction writer has done thus far, in the way that he uses language and describes places. And it is a story that Pakistan is all too familiar with – shame and violence and the impact of those two forces.
I think he is incredibly fair to all the parties that he fictionalises, and it is very funny: he says that some men are so great that only they can unmake themselves.
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Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani journalist, poet and novelist. Her father, Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan’s former president and prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima Bhutto is the author of three books: Whispers of the Desert, a volume of poetry, published when Fatima was 15 years old; 8.50am 8 October 2005, a collection of first-hand accounts from survivors of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, and Songs of Blood and Sword, which came out this year.
