Genre: Contemporary Fiction/Short Stories
Page Count: 237
I love this book’s title. I recently, upon finishing my first 100 books, made a list of book titles that I had most loved. Mueenuddin’s title for this book would definitely make it to the version two of that list. While the title itself bears a sense of mystery and domesticity with the words ‘rooms’ and ‘wonders’ in it, with its bright yellow cover featuring a village cleaning-lady pronounces this book’s appeal even more to the readers.
This is a proper and promising literary book to read about Pakistan, I thought when I purchased it. But sadly though, I think this book doesn’t like up to its title or its cover. By now, I think it’s my misfortune with reading short stories books, that I fail to like them. Kundera’s ‘the book of laughter and forgetting’ and as well as Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ were both mediocre at best. Mueenuddin’s book also is a collection of short stories, which like the other two books just mentioned, just doesn’t fit well together.
A collection of eight distinct but connected stories, this book takes places in around the 1970s or 80s in both the western villages and cities of Pakistan. Although it tells stories of theft out of poverty, sex out of greed, affairs out of boredom, love stories across different countries, and of brutal injustice done against the peasants, what all of these stories have in common are landlords, village lifestyles, and women.
If I had to pick one character that was at the center of these stories, it’d be Mr. K. K. Harouni, an inconceivably rich landlord, and all the stories are connected either to himself, his children, his relatives, or his servants.
What this book manages to do successfully is paint a vibrant picture of village life in Pakistan with vivid and powerful description of its lands, fields, and villas, while telling stories of landlords and their riches, their servants and their powerlessness, and women and their use of seduction to pave their ways.
Some of the stories, involving women, work as a kind of sneak peak into what goes inside these big villas in the villages, and how women either use themselves or are used by others in different contexts. While it’d be definitely new for the foreign readers, it was new for me as well.
Living and being raised in a conventional and small ethnic culture, I find the emphasis of females’ and male’s virginity until their marriage unquestionably important and definitive, and thereby, sex too is only to be expected between married couples, neither before marriage nor after with other people outside marriage. But while the emphasis maybe there, the taboo has always had its own charms, which sometimes elude men and women to break them, and such stories take place behind closed curtains, while the social mores continue exist in public.
Not only in books, but now a few times in my own life too, when reading or hearing these stories regarding sex, I’ve felt in me a rise of conflicting feelings: repulsion and lust, depression and excitement, despair and hope, anger and hypocrisy. As an adult now, I’m finding it harder to both make myself hear these unavoidable stories and topics, and also find a peaceful perspective to analyze and normalize them.
With that said, while Mueenuddin’s novel succeeds in disclosing such domestic stories and in painting a vibrant life-image of the countryside with words, in its prose and style it remains dimly flat. I never once felt excited or aroused with his sentences or his choice of telling a story. And that made reading this book an only okay and passable experience – that is, despite the expectations I had for it, or because of it.
Ratings: 3.5 *** December 15, 2020_