Maps for Lost Lovers

Yesterday, I said that Jim Putnam's post Reading on the 15th prompted two lines of thought. The first was about Ursula le Guin; the other concerns another author I've read recently who also makes compelling use of description.

Nadeem Aslam is a young British author of Pakistani descent. In Maps for Lost Lovers he writes compellingly and insightfully of the tensions created within the British immigrant populations in general, and Pakistani Muslim immigrants in particular. It's a story of pain, bigotry, loss, prejudice, betrayal, courage and torn loyalties ... and yet it is also a story told in poetic beauty, with love of both people and language, in both passion and compassion. It is superb.

Jim quoted the opening sentence from le Guin's The Telling; let me do the same here with Aslam's first paragraph from Maps for Lost Lovers:

"Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself. With their deliberate almost impaired pace, they fall like feathers sinking in water. The snowstorm has rinsed the air of the incense that drifts into the houses from the nearby lake with the xylophone jetty, but it is there even when absent, drawing attention to its own disappearance."

Throughout the book, that sort of language accompanies every turn of what is one of the most densely sensual novels I've read in a long time. I say "sensual" deliberately, because description is not limited to the visual: taste, scent, touch and sound are also woven into the narrative, as are inner feelings and confusions of other kinds. There is also an exquisite strand of butterfly and moth imagery (one of the lost lovers of the title is a lepidopterist) woven throughout the book.

I have a lot of friends in the communities which Aslam describes. After reading his book, though, I understood both them and myself far more deeply.

I urge everyone to read it and wonder.

"Her hair is secured by the length of silk he had retrieved for her yesterday: at lunch the red insides of a Morroccan blood orange - one of those fruit that always produce intensely scented urine - had reminded him of the colour of the scarf."

"Someone ran into the blue kitchen with its yellow tables and chairs to call 999 in rudimentary English, speaking to a white person for the fourth time in her life, wondering whether she should add the word 'fuck' into her speech now and then to sound more like a person who belonged to this country, because she had seen her English-speaking children use that word with great confidence, whatever it meant."

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Aslam, N., Maps for Lost Lovers. 2004, London, Faber and Faber.