Written by Amrita Dutta |Published: May 25, 2019 11:11:43 am
A Hypermaniac Adventure: Book review of The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack
HM Naqvi’s new novel is a baggy yarn, buoyed by a joyous celebration of a syncretic history and limited by its lack of interiority
“The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors,” wrote the critic James Wood, speaking of the novelists choice of narrative techniques. In HM Naqvi’s new novel, the door opens into the mind of Abdullah the Cossack, a historian of Currachee, whose “selected works” we are supposed to be reading. Once a man of the world – he earned the appellation Cossack by drinking a gang of Russians under the table — Abdullah is now a fat, flatulent relic living in his ancestral home, “waylaid by anxiety, lassitude, contretemps and the intermittent shove of history.”
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