SHADOWS OF THE REPUBLIC: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat It for Good, spot-on and well thought through if light on action items

SHADOWS OF THE REPUBLIC: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat It for Good
OMER AZIZ
Broadleaf Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$32.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: What is driving the rise of fascism—and how can we stop it?

In this singular investigation into the sinister realms of fascism and its many guises, Omer Aziz, author of the acclaimed Brown Boy and contributing writer for the Boston Globe, sets out to answer the Why are so many young people like him drifting to the ultranationalist right? Shadows of the Republic offers a haunting portrait of American fascism, how it began, and why it is now focused on immigration, technology, and the purification of society.

Fascism is not coming to America; it has been here for a long time. With astringent clarity, Aziz traces the flaring up of fascist ideas in both American history and our current moment.

From the dominance of the KKK, to the Nazi rally in New York in 1939, to the alliances between U.S. elites and European fascists, Aziz examines the long shadows of fascism. Traveling across the United States and Europe, he illuminates connections between street fascists and the ones in suits, between Hitler and the country across the ocean he so admired. Aziz examines culture in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, where propaganda ministers made people believe both everything and nothing, and he examines the apppeal of the far right among the very group it targets. Using interviews with experts and his own experience, he also offers an anti-fascist playbook to reinvigorate democracy and our civic life.

Fascism is a precise term, cheapened by overuse. Yet when a word describes reality, we can't afford to ignore it. From the pulsing power of an ideology of the past to its comeback among even those with the most to lose, Shadows of the Republic offers the definitive story of American fascism—and what we can do to salvage democracy for years to come.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: From the publisher's blurbs:

"A comprehensive work on fascism and America's democracy."—BOB WOODWARD
"An alarm bell announcing that the American house is on fire."—STEPHEN KING
"A provocative and passionate reminder that democracies don't collapse overnight."—CALEB GAYLE

Not bad, as a group of famous names lending a book their luster. It helps that Brown Boy already proved Author Omer's literary cred to all and sundry. (If you've never read it, your library has a decent chance of having a copy on their shelves.) A man with multiple degrees from good schools who happens to be from a Pakistani-Canadian immigrant family knows exclusion and profiling intimately. It's why he speaks with the passion for his antifascist beliefs that clearly powers his writing of this book.

What will likely open the reader's eyes is the depth and age of fascism's roots in the US. It's really easy to say "it's this regime's doing" but it ain't the whole truth, or even close to it. In doing the reporting for this book, Author Omer delved into the different identities in modern fascism, from street-level grievance-led prejudice to boardroom media-trained corporatism. Each branch of the shrub has its own genesis, its own (perverse) virtue-signaling, and its own class systems to go with its origins.

A serious problem we're watching play out in real time is the anti-intellectual fervor of fascists. Ultimately, Author Omer decries the harms being done to all of us now, but points out we can use this same reality against the fascists. It's heartening to read a book that doesn't just ring the tocsin for the republic for which we stand, but shows us who's resisting (or resisted before) and how.

I'm sad there was not *more* of that in the read, but understand the reasoning of focusing on presenting the system so we can stop making the fumblimg foolery that's led us to this dark passage in our country's existence. It's widely applicable to many places, of course, but wow are the people of the US led carefully away from thinking critically about what's happening around us. Author Omer explains how effectively and helpfully but maybe a bit too often.

Author Omer is a fine, approachable guide to the perpetrators and the resisters. It's clear whose side he's on but he doesn't fall into the trap where I live my life, ie vilifying The Others and treating them as unworthy shitty beings. I admire this character trait. I have never in my rising-seventy years on Earth been able to emulate it. Would that I could, but at least Author Omer provides example and encouragement to try, try again.

As a read, this is a fine experience; as a guide to resistance, this is an inspiring collection of ideas; as a way to support people who are doing good work in the world, buying a copy of this book is a good investment.

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel, masculinity's vast void after destruction

OF LOSS AND LAVENDER: A Novel
SINAN ANTOON
Other Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebbok, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this achingly beautiful novel of trauma, memory, and identity, two Iraqi men struggle to start a new life in the US after the Gulf War.

Sami, a retired doctor, lives with his son and grandchildren in Brooklyn. As he tries to navigate this new city, it becomes increasingly clear he is losing his memory due to dementia. Every day he sinks deeper into old memories of a life in Iraq before the war.

Omar arrived in the US with no family. He has run away from Iraq with a fake identity. As a deserter, he was punished by having an ear cut off. In Baghdad, this is an unmissable mark of shame. Omar works menial jobs, creates a new identity—comically passing as Puerto Rican—and dreams of reconstructive surgery to get his ear, and his dignity, back.

Their stories converge powerfully when it becomes clear they were connected in Iraq at a moment that was pivotal for them both. Deftly exploring the aftermath of war and relocation, Of Loss and Lavender creates a moving portrait of life in exile.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A novel of displacement. A story of male identity that, in centering differing...often competing...cultural notions of masculinity, shines a klieg light into the endless void at men's cores left by their "failures," inabilities, unwillingness to live measured by that toxic measure.

What Author Antoon did by bringing these oddly assorted immigrants to the US was subtle, clever, and tendentious. Omar is a chancer. He's blagged his way into and out of trouble since...well, who knows, we're not vouchsafed his whole life's story but I'd bet my very own United States dollars that he's been behaving this way his whole life. Omar is running even when he stands still, never at rest because rest is the point when "They" can get you in their sights to pin you in your place, the one "They" have decided you belong.

Sami's never run in his life. Towards or away from a goal or a problem, he's been steady. His aging mind has fractured from the weight of his memories. He's not agile, he's strong. Strength, unlike agility, breaks when overextended. He tries to comprehend Brooklyn, not an easy task for the native from the US, and fails. In his failure to become a Brooklynite, Sami becomes the dependent he was always responsible for, the helpless and confused neophyte he always guided...the not-powerful responsibilty in place of a lifetime as the powerful protector. Wandering in his memories he needs to build his identity Sami has no traction thanks to dementia. We meet him before the dementia robs him of enough capacity to know he's losing his battle. It is the hardest to endure of all dementia's thieveries. Sami is still Sami. Cruel is our word for this moment of struggle, outsiders who observe it; internally, no one who knows it intimately has ever told us, because they can't.

When you use these men as each others' counterpoise you get the fulcrum of the system located at masculinity. Lost, found, rejected, but "Achilles absent was Achilles still," in Homer's distillation of verity into aperçu. In bringing these wounded-by-past-lives souls to a country that shares none of their lived experiences, Author Antoon removes all the props we use to build identity from them. They have no obvious place in the cultural map they must now use to navigate Life. Omar loves this because it means he controls his narrative, he has no further need to resist the boxes he's forced to occupy because they don't exist to threaten him. It's liberation, yes, but it comes as always at a price. Belonging, the sense of purpose that it grants, is also in those boxes that confine, shape, define Omar (including his name, fictional though it is). Freedom isn't free. Never has that truth been more stark than to Omar in Brooklyn.

Living your life in translation is never easy. It is a hidden cost of Othering those not deemed "mainstream" or those who are immigrants in similar degrees. Author Antoon is an iraqi immigrant to New York, a novelist and (it says in his biography) poet who translates from (and/or to) Arabic; It shows in this very good novel. It feels like he is translating the experience of masculinity from one culture to another, like the characters are finding ways to make sense of the world that use words no longer part of their fluency. Sami's losses are structural intrinsic; Omar's are voluntary, elective; both are costly and exact significant emotional tolls on each man's journey through the maze of Brooklyn.

As a professor at New York University, Author Antoon is no doubt drawing on his own immigrant experience in the vast, bewildering social system of New York. I hope the world here has treated him with greater kindness than either of these characters received. I offer the story an incomplete fifth star because I was immersed in the flume of the story's canal, the high-pressure constriction that roils and directs but does not deliver to an end point the narrative waters. What, in the end, did Omar and Sami do as a result of occupying the same canal? They changed; but in tandem not in response to each other.

I derived a lot of pleasure from the story. I hope y'all will give it your time and treasure. I think the way each character experienced their quest after identity was so poignantly masculine, so painfully rooted in their manhood, that many women would get significant value from this male interiority.

MISSING SAM, urgently tale urgent told

MISSING SAM
THRITY UMRIGAR
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling author Thrity Umrigar, a thrilling and haunting story of an Indian-American woman who becomes the prime suspect when her wife goes missing.

When Aliya and Samantha have a fight one night, Samantha goes for a run early the next morning—and doesn’t come back.

Aliya reports her wife Samantha as missing, but as a gay and Muslim daughter of immigrants, she’s immediately suspected by her neighbors in Samantha's disappearance. Scared and furious and feeling isolated as everyone around her doubts her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. All the while, Samantha is being held captive, strategizing how to escape before things escalate even more. Meanwhile, Aliya must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for these women even after Samantha is rescued?

A provocative examination of suburban mores, Missing Sam captures the terror manifested in today’s political climate, and the real dangers, both physical and psychological, of being Brown and queer in America.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was leery of reading this expansion on the "be careful of your words, you do not which will be your last" aphorism. I took the DRC because I like stories by and about my lesbian siblings in Otherhood, and because I'm pretty damned sure we're going to see this kind of horror again in the future so I wanted to get it out there.

Sam and Ali are well-drawn, fully realized people. We see each one's PoV, so we know what Ali doesn't, that Sam is alive. It should diminish the stakes, yet Author Umgar uses the technique well enough that it did not.

I was, for the most part, glad to keep reading the story though as parents and social media and investigators kept becoming more toxic by the page I wanted to say, "Thrity! enough already!" When piling on the trouble the story begins to feel like the artificial construct it is. Never mind that reality does this ad more to people...fiction is different, plays by different rules. When COVID hit, I hit the wall. It took some time for me to come back.

After Sam is rescued, the true horror (for me) began: How do you put yourself...your wife...you entire life...back together after the sheer awfulness of what each of you has been through? What alchemy do you need to work in order to remake bonds that have been, without either one's volition, shattered? This horror was very well, very believably, explored. The ending was the culmination of multiple strands of un/making and remodeling.

What kept me from making a bigger fuss about the book was the dropped and abandoned threads, eg Kabir's development. I loved the challenged queer marriage that had to sustain or fail the spouses...it's the way reality is when you're in a committed relationship. The resolution Author Umrigar presents is pitch-perfect. I think the story of an immigrant, a Muslim, a queer woman, interacting with the power structures that see her as enemy Other, is one we should all reckon with.

It's not like the world is waiting for us to wake up to injustice on our own. It is ringing alarm bells and sounding klaxons and stories like this one are the easy way to see why waking up to it is so important.

RADIANT FUGITIVES, debut novel from a recovering capitalist has all the heartfulness

RADIANT FUGITIVES
NAWAAZ AHMED
Counterpoint Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.95 trade paper, available now

A BOOKRIOT BEST BOOK OF 2021!

Rating: 3.75* of five

LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST: “Living in America Is Like Living in an In-Law’s House.” with Author Ahmed on Mitzi Rapkin's First Draft Podcast

OCTOBER 2021 UPDATE Read this brief profile about Author Ahmed in PW!

The Publisher Says: A tour-de-force debut following three generations of a Muslim-Indian family confronted with a nation on the brink of change in Obama-era San Francisco and Texas with a blockbuster ending you have to read to believe.

Working as a political activist in the early days of the Obama presidency, Seema still struggles with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian, forcing her to construct a new life in the West. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the father of her unborn son, Seema seeks reconciliation with the family that once renounced her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, an OB-GYN living in Texas with her husband and children.

Pushed apart and drawn together in equal measure by their often conflicting beliefs, Seema, Tahera, and Nafeesa must confront the complex yearnings in their relationships with one another—and within their innermost selves—as the events that transpire over the course of one fateful week unearth an accumulated lifetime of love, betrayal, and misunderstandings.

Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, and the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is an operatic debut from a bold new voice, exploring the tensions between ideology and practicality, hope and tradition, forgiveness and retribution for one family navigating a shifting political landscape.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Debut novelist Ahmed has done something special with this book. He has chosen to tell a story of rigidity and rage, of tenderness and forgiveness, and of sadness and loss from the point of view of a perinatal infant whose mother has died in trying to give him life.

That is a bold decision. And it's not a spoiler because there's no way you could possibly miss it...the author says it plain and straight on the first page. I spent the first few pages a little unsure of the wisdom of it, because it will inevitably lead to the Satanic Second Person sooner or later. (Sooner as it turns out.) But the choice, like all bold gambles, carries a certain momentum that either weighs the reader down or drags him along in its wake. I was dragged. I wasn't sure I would be. When the infant addresses his grandmother as "Grandmother," I confess I winced and even pooh-poohed the idea. I was too taken in by the way Seema, the "hasbian" (in the ugly, dismissive formulation I've heard lesbians use towards one who marries a man...why not "bisexual" I've always wondered) mother of this child, was continually struggling to find her footing in the narrative...bad choice for a narrator; Nafeesa, the terminally ill grandmother, was too cowed and rendered voiceless by her entire life's denied course; Tahera, the rigidly religious sister, was too ragey and resentful. No one else matters, their quiet places in the story don't ripple strongly enough to compete with the women and their unborn male relative. I definitely include the father in this. Poor bastard.

Back to our narrator, Ishraaq (meaning "Dawn"). He is the right choice to tell us this story because, like all infants, it's the story he inherits by his simple act of drawing breath. So my cavils were set aside, and the story progressed...familiar things happened. For example, I recognized the divide between the sisters as superficially being about their differing faith-walks but really being about the disfiguring jealousy of sisters denied the place they thought was theirs. Sibling rivalry was always going to rip their relationship to shreds. Their mother wasn't capable of standing up for herself, still less her daughters, against their forceful father and his ungovernable passions for poetry and control. Keats isn't used as a love language in their family so much as an armory of unresolvable resentments...it's their father's favorite work, and their mother was bludgeoned with it despite her love of her native Urdu and its vast, beautiful literature.

As an adult, Ishraaq's mother is an out lesbian. That goes over badly with her devout Muslim father. Mother, of course, submits her actions to her husband's control. They cut their heretical daughter out of their lives. And she, for her part, builds quite a world for herself in activist politics, while her dutiful and Muslim younger sister becomes a family physician...so no slouch in the brains department. Such a lot of anger for Big Sis from childhood...it quite naturally fuels her religious rejection of Seema for her lifestyle. In his role as narrator, Ishraaq doesn't dwell on the particulars of his mother's sex life, which I think was a good authorial call. It doesn't feel to me as though anything in the story requires us to follow the characters into their bedrooms. I noted the fact that we mostly hadn't, and then thought, well, what a great way to make use of such a narrator!

What I didn't find so believable was the way Ishraaq was sometimes omniscient, discussing things that would be impossible for him to know because the belly he was inhabiting was elsewhere. A conversation between his father and grandmother marked the first time I was jolted into awareness of the issue. It's here that the reader will stall out..."this is impossible, forget it"...or will reach the accommodation that I did: "we're assuming a consciousness is Ishraaq, not the infant flesh is Ishraaq, and the story ends when he's mere moments old." I'll get past my collywobbles re: magical narrators if there's at least a shred of a line to cling to as I suspend my disbelief. It was a close-run thing, though.

Events happen that ground us in the US of 2010. Obamacare, Kamala Harris as a candidate for Attorney General, mosque vandalism...all struck resonant chords in me. I was also taken by setting the narrative in San Francisco for the most part. I loved the atmospheric descriptions of San Francisco's fog belt, and the evocation of Dolores Park. The use of color in the book is quite elegant...a deep, unrepentant purple sky!...as is the food the characters prepare, offer, consume. There's a much-needed specificity to these moments. A great deal of the book feels less moored, grounded, because it's a flashback. The past that Ishraaq narrates, or observes I suppose, and then describes, is of necessity less vibrant than a directly shown and not told timeline would be. In many ways this choice was made when Author Ahmed chose his narrator. There really is no other practical way to tell a story from that point of view.

There are secondary characters with arcs that will shock you. There are characters whose "it's all my fault"s rang in my ears as solipsistic and self-important. There are moments of sheer blithering idiocy when decisions that should've been postponed are instead made and made badly. And that's one of the best things about the book to me. I enjoy a story with real-feeling stakes...death is a real stake, and there's more death in the book than is at first evident. The "radiant fugitives" of the title, what elicits that particular descriptive phrase, make for one of the book's set it down and say "wooow" moments.

But even the death serves its purpose. People are never more themselves than when they are around death. The selves they are, all too often, are not the selves they want to be. And it's this immense tension that gives Radiant Fugitives its narrative drive, its memorable ending, its full measure of sadness and rage, love and compassion. It's a book that forgives its characters for being less than their best selves and giving less than their all when they're called to step up. The ending will strike some as overdone, it did me, but it was most certainly an organic, honest ending to the story we started out reading. That makes the journey a good and worthwile one, and as a debut novel, one of above-average skill to create.

But, and I mean this, someone at Counterpoint needs to fix "Irvine, Texas" to read "Irving" because Irvine's in California. Irving's in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

RAIN AND EMBERS, an immigrant poet and artist comes clean and goes clear

RAIN AND EMBERS
ALI NURI
Kindle edition
$8.00 ebook or paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The (Self-)Publisher Says: A poetic story of survival, Rain and Embers touches on far-reaching themes of migration, forgiveness, and love.

An urgent and necessary study in dualities, Ali Nuri offers a migrant's perspective on what it means to be torn between East and West, sun and moon, the past and the present. Following the story of a refugee in a constant state of flux, Rain and Embers encapsulates the human condition--one where a sense of belonging is elusive amidst an ever-changing landscape.

Above all, Rain and Embers is an exploration of fractured identities, acceptance, and finding a place to call home. When all the ashes wash away, beauty remains in the wreckage, waiting to bloom once more.


this dance of you and I
is the flickering of flames
a fire raging in the dead of night

to be yours
is to be entangled
with the source of poetry

the letters shape themselves
line after line they assemble
from a fountain of ink

your love
is a mother to words
a parent to poetic purpose

but alas
what is to remain
of kindling if not ash?

My Review: How does an Arab immigrant to the US, living in Las Vegas...possibly the most American place on Earth's surface, parched and dry and hot and gaudy...process his fragmented identity?

Who is he, why is he that person, and most of all...why should you care?

Because identity as an American is front and center in the life of the country in the 21st century. Because the answers to those questions matter more than ever. Historically immigration has stirred violent passions in the hoi polloi as the lower classes seek to be better than someone, anyone at all, and the upper classes seek to ensure their fiscal and social stranglehold on the national discourse that it may never be allowed to stray into a real, egalitarian call for justice.

This is what you see before you right now, theydies and gentlethem. The latest salvo in a long-running war against ordinary people by those who profit from their labor. And Ali Nuri, disadvantaged in this country by several layers of identity, has prospered, is contributing to the society that would turn on him in a heartbeat because he's darker skinned than the ideal held up to all who enter this closed and inbred culture. He works to make our American lives more easeful in the vehicle automation sector. People like me will benefit greatly from the increased mobility the eventual rise of the driverless car will enable. And this young poet, this artist with a tender heart and a cold, insecure perch among us, gifts us all with his most intimate thoughts and observations.

Make no mistake: Outsiders are the best poets. Ali Nuri's eyes are looking at the same landscape your eyes are, fellow Americans and foreign readers, but they're seeing what those not here and those whose place here is unquestioned can not see. Then he tells us what we look like, but manages to be kind about it. (Most of the time.) So what drove his family out of Iraq? He tells you directly here, and a more damning indictment of our nation's inhospitable welcome of those in need you won't read soon.

Ali gifted me a copy of his book. He's a photographer as well as a poet, and he understands the human costs of making art deeply and indelibly. His experience of the life of an incomer to a closed world, one whose love and whose life aren't valued by those around him, informs every line and every frame of his work.

I don't like poetry. I do like Ali Nuri's writing. I learned to love his depths and snort tolerantly at his shallows. I learned to think of him as Ali, not as "the immigrant poet guy." Do the same, you won't be disappointed.

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, ideal book-and-movie book club choice

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG
ANDRE DUBUS III
W.W. Norton
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force sees a way to restore his family's dignity in an attractive bungalow available on county auction. But the house's owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, will fight for the one thing she has left. And her lover, a married cop, will be driven to extremes to win her love. In this masterpiece of American realism and Shakespearean consequence, Andre Dubus III's unforgettable characters careen toward inevitable conflict, their tragedy painting a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.

My Review: Behrani. An exiled colonel in the Shah's army. Kathy. A fucked-up druggie living off her inheritance. Lester. A major idiot whose law-enforcement career is his last best shot at staying off welfare.

Not one of these people will leave this book better than they entered it. Kathy's only home is the one she inherited, and the county says it's not hers anymore because she hasn't paid the taxes. She has, though. She's completely unable to function in the world because she's hazed on drugs for so long that even when she's clean she can't think straight. That means she can't figure out how to prove she has complied with the law.

Behrani can't get an American life going. He has savings (one hesitates to imagine where the money came from originally) that barely keep him afloat, and jobs that demean him but are all a man with no skills except being an Army officer can get. But his son's college money is sufficient to buy a distressed property at auction. Kathy's home, as it turns out. He plans to renovate and flip it, using this as a stepping-stone to American Dream-level prosperity.

Lester comes in as the deputy assigned to be sure Kathy gets out of the home that's no longer hers. Love at first sight! Lame-o Lester and Loser Kathy...surely the white trash Romeo and Juliet!

Pretty much.

Dubus drags us through the legal system as the parties battle out the rights and wrongs of the case. No one here is a good person, just a greedy selfish prick who deserves what, in the end, is meted out to them by the author's just and pitiless exercise of karmic debt collection.

NOT an uplifting book. My withers were wrung about every twenty pages, and I took frequent breaks in order to console myself with excessive liquor consumption and sordid sexual escapades.

I love a book that brings out the best in me.

There's a scene where Lame-o Lester gets his first-ever BJ from Loser Kathy, which Dubus goes into in a bizarrely flat and affectless way that completely desxualizes the act, makes it a symptom of a pathology and not an erotic or intimate or even sexy development. It's just part of the sickness pervading these broken, unfixable people's existences.

Did you *get* that? A man wrote about the thing most men want more than food and only slightly less than air, and made it *unappealing*.

Dubus is a master of his craft. He is an artist. He can do anything he wants with words to make them dance in the reader's head to HIS tune, screw whatever you were expecting, reader! He can fashion a story that, in its outlines, sounds juicy and ripe with conflict, and make it a sharp object that will deflate whatever happy illusions were still in your head about yourself and this Murrikin Dream we're supposed to be having, reader!

And that is why you should read this book.

Book club reading guide free here.

Another reading group guide free here.

THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN, Usman Malik's World Fantasy Award-nominated mind-blowing novella

THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN
USMAN MALIK
Tor.com Original
Free online read, or 99¢ on Kindle

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A fantasy novella about a disenchanted young Pakistani professor who grew up and lives in the United States, but is haunted by the magical, mystical tales his grandfather told him of a princess and a Jinn who lived in Lahore when the grandfather was a boy.

My Review: Robert Burns said it best when he wrote "To a Louse,On Seeing one on a Lady's Bonnet in Church":

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
And ev’n Devotion!

Sal(man) is a young academic trying to make his way in the vicious world of Boston academia. (The smaller the stakes, the nastier the battle.) His Pakistani immigrant parents live in a Florida trailer park with his paternal grandfather. His escape from the life of the parental units was studying mythology and folktales, an interest sparked by the stories his Alzheimer's-addled grandfather told him. One story in particular, that of the Mughal princess who ran a tea stall next to a tree that housed a jinn—an elemental being, not a "genie" as the Western bastardization of the Islamic culture's mythology created—tied to the royal bloodline of the Mughals. Legend had it that the jinn protected the princess, and the princess the jinn.

One fine day, according to Gramps (such a very American way to address a grandfather, eh what?), a young boy in the neighborhood climbed the eucalyptus tree and fell from it, to be succored by the princess. This was the ignition of a chain of events that forms the rest of the novella. The eucalyptus is slated for destruction; then lightning strikes it. Secrets. Half-truths and outright lies, misdirection and redirection and tantalizingly vague non-endings to unending stories. And an ending to this tale that made me glow with rapturous pleasure.

Sal explores Gramps's journal and many books after his death. It is an amazement to him that there are so many, since they weren't there when he went away to school and then began his career. It also astonishes Sal that his grandfather annotated the books in such an erudite and academic manner. The old man worked in a 7-11 after emigrating to the US in the 1970s! Who knew he had such thoughts!

The discovery of his Gramps's treasure trove is the next propulsive event in the tale's amazing unfolding. Sal is so riveted by the reading he's doing, all of it a deep inquiry into Islamic folklore, that his Anglo-Saxon girlfriend feels and is neglected. When Sal gets into Gramps's annotations so deep that he puts together a revolutionary cosmology that emerges from all the information, he is impelled to visit (for the first time in his life) Lahore, Pakistan, Gramps's native city.

I can't now go any further into the events of the novella because, for once, *I* don't want to give spoilers! *ME* the king of "yeah, so?" about them! But please listen carefully: This is the single best ending-cum-wrapup of a story I've read this year.

If that doesn't tell you enough to make you run right over and procure the story to read, you haven't paid me much attention. I am almost uniformly disappointed in endings. This one, not at all; in fact, the diametric opposite of disappointed.

To Usman Malik I offer a humble, grateful salam.