Where Are the Trees Going

Mohsin Hamid. Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London. New York. Riverhead Books / Penguin. 2015. isbn 9781594633652 Mohsin Hamid, novelist and essayist, has lived in Pakistan, England, and the United States, cultivating a tension over identity that pervades his essay collection Discontent and Its Civilizations. The collection’s essays span from 2000—pulsing on the cusp of the attacks of 9/11—to 2014, offering the perspective of a new father who has returned to Pakistan to raise his daughter. The book’s sections—“Life,” “Art,” and “Politics”—offer succinct, previously published essays, which Hamid uses to express his urgent concern for the world. The most recent essays focus on Pakistan, where his daughter will grow and learn. In the title essay, Hamid discusses covering her window with blast-resistant film; he worries that his desire to protect her “will dim my daughter’s view” of a favorite “yellow-blooming amaltas tree.” The desire to protect without sheltering permeates the collection, for Hamid loves and is repelled by much of what he sees happening in life, art, and politics over the course of the first decade of the new millennium. Choosing along with his partner to return to Pakistan to participate in that country’s reimagining, Hamid summarizes in “Personal and Political Intertwined” the experience of many of the essays: “Things in the country around me these past few years have been mixed. Much is horrible, much is beautiful, and much is in between.” His ability to see all sides of the story makes reading the essays feel like having a conversation with a partner, a person who wants to convince the reader there is much at stake, that a world needs literature even more when there are drones flying overhead, that one needs to look at the majestic tree through a window shadowed by blast-resistant film. Hamid admits in “My Foreign Correspondence ” that he is inventing himself, his argument, and his understanding of nationhood as he goes along. He lays bare his complicated quest for identity—in religion , nationality, even parental status—to convey the necessity for change resulting in global stability. He lives in a country tensed with the threat of violence: “America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24/7/365.” His hope for Pakistan, the world, and his daughter in the face of terrible events is the nerve center of this fine collection. Colleen Lutz Clemens Kutztown University Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Where Are the Trees Going? Marilyn Hacker, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2014. isbn 9780810130081 Born in Lebanon, Vénus Khoury-Ghata has lived in France since 1972. She has published forty books of novels, poetry, and translations, which earned her the 2011 Goncourt Prize for her entire body of work. Four volumes of poems have appeared in English since 2000 thanks to talented fellow poet and translator Marilyn Hacker. Where Are the Trees Going? was crowned in its French version by the 2013 Pierrette Micheloud Poetry Prize. The English version contains selections from two prose volumes; several of its poems have appeared in print and online in British, Lebanese, and American literary magazines, sometimes in different versions. The prose excerpts constitute a canvas that helps organize the poems into polyphonic threads. Khoury-Ghata’s rhythms are part lullaby and part incantation: “If one moth left the lamp the evening turned to night / The mother put us to bed head-to-foot with trees the same age as ourselves.” Objects, trees, humans, wind, or water perform Leo Tolstoy Strider: The Story of a Horse Louise Maude & Aylmer Maude, tr. Borderland Books Famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrestles with questions of aging and mortality in this lesser-known novel. Told largely from the viewpoint of an old horse recounting his story and his owner’s as they go through life and experience decline, Tolstoy’s sharp prose pierces to the heart of humanity and shows us our true selves. Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust Thomas Ország-Land, ed. & tr. Smokestack Books Out of one of the greatest historical tragedies of the twentieth century comes this anthology of poetry written by sufferers of the Holocaust

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Daughter · Genealogy · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Diaspora