by Nadeem Aslam
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From the book
Prologue
It was a large room. There were many shelves of books, a metal helmet for a stallion from the times of the Crusades, and there were the vertebrae of a whale from a bay in Antarctica. In one alcove was the earliest known photograph of a snowflake.
The child entered the silence and stillness of the vast interior through the far door. She came past the fishing canoe resting on a long low table under the window.
She was seven years old and her name was Helen.
Two buildings stood next to each other at the centre of the room. Each was taller than the girl, was perhaps four times her height. During that early morning hour, the light still only half awake, she stood looking at them.
They appeared to be mosques, and they were beautiful—with their families of domes, semi-domes, and minarets. She thought of them as two elaborate hats or headdresses, possibly meant for djinns or a pair of giants from a fairytale. She considered taking a few additional steps and peering through one of their windows. The colours and features were so precise and assorted—the muted shine on the walls and the arcs of the domes. She reached out and touched the detail of a painted leaf.
Buildings situated within a room! Normally it was a room that existed within a building, was contained by it. She described a circle around them now.
She went past the cupboard where stood the vase of dried branches brought back from Russia. They were from the apple trees that Count Tolstoy had planted with his own hands. Four of them were still alive in his orchard.
The girl stopped when one of the buildings produced a creak, as though it were experiencing a mild earthquake. It stirred now and rose a few inches, breaking free of gravity, swaying a little. And then it ascended further, beginning to travel at a languid pace towards the ceiling. It was being pulled up by the delicate-seeming yet strong chains that were attached to the tips of its minarets. Eventually it came to a stop—up there, in the high distance
The immense room she was in was a library and a study. A place of fertile solitude. Due to its size it was difficult to heat in the winter months. Not long ago they had had the idea of bringing in two small cabins—each just large enough to house a desk and chair, a stack of immediately necessary books and papers, and a small heater. The thinking was that from December to February a person would go into one of the cabins, close the door behind her, and work in that pocket of warmth. From ordinary cabins, however, they had become detailed models of two historic buildings—the Great Mosque of Córdoba, and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
The girl had caught glimpses of them being constructed during the previous few weeks. Now they were ready, and because it was June they were being winched up, to remain suspended up there until December.
After the Hagia Sophia, she watched the Great Mosque of Córdoba being pulled up by the system of pulleys and chains.
Neither of the two buildings had a floor of its own. They would borrow the room's floor when they were down here. So when Helen looked up now she could see into the interiors. She imagined moths fluttering like trapped prayers under the miniature domes in the evenings, bumping against the coloured insides. She would always remember this handful of moments from her early years. Childhood—when minutes could feel as prolonged as hours, and the days vanished in the blink of an eye
It was Helen's father who had carpentered the buildings. And it was he who was causing them to rise through the air, storing them out of the...
About the Author-
- Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan and now lives in England. He is the author of four previous novels, most recently The Blind Man’s Garden. His work has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and has won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Encore Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Reviews-
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Starred review from February 27, 2017
Aslam’s exquisite, luminous novel is set in the imaginary city of Samara, somewhere in northern Pakistan between Kashmir and the border of Afghanistan. Nargis, an architect, has lost her husband, Massud, to a rogue American bullet, which hit him as he passed books in a human chain to a new library that he and Nargis designed. Their Christian ex-servant, Lily, and his daughter, Helen, whom Nargis and Massud have nurtured intellectually and whose mother was murdered by a Muslim, live next door. Helen falls in love with a Kashmiri named Imran, who turns up at Nargis’s house one day, having escaped from a group of jihadists with whom he trained. Bigotry frequently erupts into violence in their district, and each of these characters will suffer. Nargis is pressured by a military intelligence agent to forgive her husband’s murderer for blood money. Helen is pursued for blasphemous journalism. Lily, a Christian, and his lover, the widowed daughter of a local Muslim cleric, are exposed and pursued by a mob, which burns down their neighborhood. Lily disappears, and Nargis, Helen, and Imran flee to a secluded island, where they begin a strange but lovely idyll of love and friendship that sharply contrasts with what surrounds them. Hidden, the three lovingly repair a book written by Massud’s father that was torn to pieces by the authorities, using golden thread to stitch its pages together again. The Pakistan depicted in this harrowing novel is unbearably wrenched apart by terror and prejudice, but the dignity of Aslam’s (The Blind Man’s Garden) characters and their devotion to one another rises far above the violence. -
Starred review from February 15, 2017
"This world is the last thing God will ever tell us": an aching, lyrical story of schisms and secrets in present-day Pakistan.Nargis has something to tell, a secret that she has been carrying for a lifetime. "She had succeeded in concealing herself in the false story she had constructed," writes Aslam (The Blind Man's Garden, 2013, etc.), having already suggested why there are many good reasons to hide inside inventions in a Pakistan that is increasingly torn apart by sectarian strife, the muezzin's call punctuated by denunciations of romance across religious lines as gentle young scholars rush to join the jihadis. There is much violence: Nargis' Christian housekeepers are still mourning the loss of one of their own, murdered by a man just recently freed from prison as a reward for having memorized the Quran, and now Nargis must deal with grief herself, her husband caught in the crossfire of a gunfight involving a "large healthily built white man." She has barely a moment to mourn when Pakistani military intelligence agents are at her door to demand that she forgive the American for the death--a demand that carries the implication that if she does not comply, her secret will come spilling out to destroy the rest of her family. Aslam's story has all the gravity of a tragedy and one of many dimensions: Nargis' island retreat, once a place of calm where a church and a Hindu temple stood alongside a mosque, is riven by people seeking difference in the place of similarity, as she wonders, "Which God or Gods had built that world?" And indeed, tucked away inside Aslam's quietly unwinding narrative are snippets of and allusions to religious tales that speak to the wisdom of earlier days--the title itself is one of them--against the unwisdom of our own. Brooding and beautiful: a mature, assured story of the fragility of the world and of ourselves.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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March 15, 2017
The Pakistan of memory, with its relative tolerance, collides with the harsh realities of modern Pakistan in Aslam's (The Blind Man's Garden, 2013) aching lamentation. Massud and Narghis are husband-and-wife architects and guardians of a treasured library. But when Massud is killed in an altercation involving an American spy, a Pakistani intelligence officer turns ruthless in his insistence that Narghis publicly forgive the attacker. Meanwhile, Narghis' adopted daughter, Helen, a journalist who was born Christian but pretends to be Muslim, falls in love with Imran, a Kashmiri gone AWOL from a terrorist training camp. Together they shelter in the remains of an island mosque that the architects, in a moment of idealism, had designed to bring rival sects together in ecumenical worship. But even there, they cannot find sanctuary. The plot pivots on acts of cruelty and political violence, but the moments in between are wistful, languid, and suffused with longing for a gentler time. Carefully constructed and thoughtful, this is, one senses, a highly personal work for Aslam, whose family was forced to leave Pakistan.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.) -
November 15, 2016
Twice long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the brilliantly nuanced Aslam tells the story of Nargis, devastated when her husband is killed on the Grand Trunk Road before she can reveal a dark secret. And no wonder. Not only is military intelligence pressuring her to forgive her husband's American killer, but people's secrets are being mysteriously broadcast from the minaret of the local mosque, with a forbidden romance between a Muslim cleric's daughter and Nargis's Christian neighbor stirring special trouble.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 15, 2017
On the day of his death, Massud awoke to the muezzin's call to prayer and the smell of baking bread, a fragrance, he had read, that instills kindness in human beings. There are many acts of generosity in this exquisite novel, though they are equaled by the treachery and corruption common to this Punjab region of northern Pakistan, where Muslims and Christians live warily side by side. Massud's grieving widow, Nargis, refuses to accept blood money from the state in exchange for her absolution of the American who shot her husband, causing the authorities to investigate this difficult woman, who may be harboring a blasphemous secret. Her intransigence draws adverse scrutiny to the Christian family who lives next door, a young woman named Helen and her widowed father, Lily, who is in a forbidden relationship with the imam's daughter. Through the reminiscences of each of these deeply sympathetic characters, Aslam (The Blind Man's Garden; The Wasted Vigil) elucidates the history of occupation and division that has influenced Pakistan's current climate of religious intolerance. VERDICT Man Booker Prize long-listed and Dublin short-listed Aslam uses lush, sensuous prose to create beauty from ugliness, calm from chaos, and love from hatred, offering hope to believers and nonbelievers alike. This thoughtful, thought-provoking read will enthrall lovers of international fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/17/16.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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February 15, 2017
On the day of his death, Massud awoke to the muezzin's call to prayer and the smell of baking bread, a fragrance, he had read, that instills kindness in human beings. There are many acts of generosity in this exquisite novel, though they are equaled by the treachery and corruption common to this Punjab region of northern Pakistan, where Muslims and Christians live warily side by side. Massud's grieving widow, Nargis, refuses to accept blood money from the state in exchange for her absolution of the American who shot her husband, causing the authorities to investigate this difficult woman, who may be harboring a blasphemous secret. Her intransigence draws adverse scrutiny to the Christian family who lives next door, a young woman named Helen and her widowed father, Lily, who is in a forbidden relationship with the imam's daughter. Through the reminiscences of each of these deeply sympathetic characters, Aslam (The Blind Man's Garden; The Wasted Vigil) elucidates the history of occupation and division that has influenced Pakistan's current climate of religious intolerance. VERDICT Man Booker Prize long-listed and Dublin short-listed Aslam uses lush, sensuous prose to create beauty from ugliness, calm from chaos, and love from hatred, offering hope to believers and nonbelievers alike. This thoughtful, thought-provoking read will enthrall lovers of international fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/17/16.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- The New York Times Book Review "Powerful and engrossing. . . . [Aslam] writes with great sensitivity and depth."
- The Boston Globe "Stunning. . . . [The Golden Legend is] masterful and compelling fiction, intricately layering symbols and parallels, unspooling its plot in dramatic twists until the very last sentence."
- The Washington Post "A powerful and timely comment on the precarious state of religious minorities in Pakistan and an honest mirror to the Pakistani state and society."
- The Wall Street Journal "Beautifully imagined."
- The Economist "Remarkable. . . . The Golden Legend is extravagant with imagery and elaborate with metaphor."
- O, The Oprah Magazine "A heart-pounding and timely novel about kinship and resilience."
- Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch "A magical book. . . . Aslam's writing is lyrical and expansive. . . . He's a brilliant novelist, one of two or three truly great writers in the world today. His work reminds me of Orhan Pamuk at an earlier stage of his career. And, yes, like Pamuk, Nadeem Aslam ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature."
- Financial Times "At once a coming-of-age love story, a study of loss, and a lucid portrait of the conflicts pervading contemporary Pakistan. . . . Aslam's crystalline prose and emotionally nuanced characters give his novel a wide resonance. . . . Though unsparing in its depiction of the brutal exercise of power, this is also a paean to human resilience."
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