How Book Club Challenges Help Us Grow
Book Notes: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
At first, I resisted. Our book club selection was a book of eight short stories. About Pakistan, of all places.
I am not a fan of short stories, and I know very little about Pakistan. But I love, admire, and respect Mary, who recommended the book. I had to read her book, but not right now.
I stepped away from the task and returned later to read the first three stories. They were challenging for me. I could not relate to the electrician of the first story, and I found the ideas the writer was presenting a little off-putting. I procrastinated reading more.
Then, our meeting was on the horizon, and I had to finish and prepare.
The stories are varied, but they all present sets of characters living in present-day Punjab in southeast Pakistan, where Lahore is the provincial capital. Also, they all have some connection to an aging landowner who is a holdover from the region’s feudal days.
The characters range from the poorest of the poor to globetrotting sophisticates.
What are the stories about?
Some familiar themes the author explores include relationships between parents and children, between lovers, and among persons from different social strata. I also was interested in reading about creating and maintaining a productive farm and about parties the young enjoyed.
But cultural differences were difficult for me to grasp. The author mixes persons from all levels of society in the same story in ways I had not encountered before. And I needed to create a new mindset for each of the stories.
Each story is significantly different from the others, despite each story having some link to the elderly landowner.
Plus, I kept wondering about the author’s experiences and how they fit into his stories. Who is this writer pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of this complex, slow-changing culture?
He includes two believable American women characters, and I wondered how he wrote of them with authority.
So, before our meeting to discuss the book, I had to seek answers to these questions.
What is the author’s connection to Punjab and these characters?
The author’s background explains a lot.
It is not just that his father was Pakistani and his mother was American; his parents were very well connected in their fields, government and literary circles, respectively.
After his parents were married, they lived in Pakistan, but his mother returned to the U.S. to deliver her two sons.
The boys spent summers in the U.S., and when Daniyal was 13, their parents divorced, and the boys came with their mother to live in the U.S.A.
After graduating from Dartmouth, Mueenuddin returned to Pakistan to rescue the family farm as his father’s health failed.
In 1993, he returned to the U.S. and became a lawyer in Manhattan. In 2001, he left corporate lawyering and returned to his farm in Pakistan to write stories about “the dissolving feudal order and the new way coming, the sleek businessmen from the cities.”
In 2004, he returned to the U.S.A. and earned his MFA from the University of Arizona. A short story published in 2006 landed him an agent who helped him publish this book in 2009.
During his time in Pakistan and the U.S.A., Mueenuddin developed his stories to bridge the gap between the two halves of his life experiences.
