If Burnt Shadows were nothing more than a big, bold, sprawling novel crossing generations and continents from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945 to the wrenching Partition of India and Pakistan on Aug. 14 – 15, 1947 to the airplane bombing of the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001 and the global carnage unleashed by the world’s remaining superpower in its aftermath, British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie would be owed a debt of gratitude by fiction lovers simply for the audacity of her imagination.
But Burnt Shadows, Shamsie’s fifth novel, is all that and so much more.
It’s also an intimate story of two families and their intertwined lives over three generations: German-born Konrad Weiss, vaporized into the clear blue sky of Nagasaki, his sister Elizabeth and her English husband, James Burton (whom we first meet in Delhi), their (ultimately American) son, Harry and his daughter, Kim; Weiss’ financée Hiroko Tanaka, with the birds of her kimono permanently scarred onto her back by the Bomb, and her husband Sajjad Ashraf (they eventually settle in Karachi) and their late-in-life son, Raza.
Astonishingly, Hiroko is there in Nagasaki at the novel’s beginning and in New York City at its end; and it’s a tribute to Shamsie’s multifarious talents as a writer that she is not only able to stitch together this vast, encompassing quilt of a tale, but to do so with such skill that it’s all but impossible for the reader to notice her stitchwork.
Shamsie writes beautiful, gorgeous, breathtaking, spirit-tingling sentences. Stanley Fish (author of How To Write A Sentence & How To Read One) would love Burnt Shadows for nothing more than the pleasure of reading sentences like these:
“Under a pale-leafed tree she holds her arms up to be patterned with drifting spots of sun and shadow as the branches sway in a breeze that isn’t perceptible at ground-level.” (p. 16)
“She said his name, repeated endearments in English, Urdu, Japanese—but he couldn’t hear her above the fluttering of pigeons and the call of the muezzin of Jama Masjid and the cacophony of his brothers’ arguments and the hubbub of merchants and buyers in Chandni Chowk and the rustling of palm leaves in the monsoons and the laughter of his nephews and nieces and the shouts of kite-fliers and the burble of fountains in courtyards and the husky voice of the never-seen neighbour singing ghazals before sunrise and his heartbeat, his frantic heartbeat….” (p. 127)
“It was guilt that kept his hands from reaching out to Hiroko, though it made no sense to him that he should feel guilt for this when he hadn’t for so many other things which by the standards of ordinary, little-picture morality should have had him sobbing in a bar or some other secular confessional.” (p. 246)
“What a gift, then, what a surprising gift, to be able to say the moment when freedom ended had counted for something. Finally, he counted for something.” (p. 363)
…and hundreds more like them.
In a 2014 interview, Shamsie said, “I don’t think there’s anything like the novel for empathy … If you write non-fiction it’s as though you are from the outside looking at something. But if you write fiction, you are behind someone’s eyes looking out, and that’s the difference.”
In the absence of American novelists tackling their nation’s imperial behavior and its reckless, heedless, careless consequences for their own people and for those around the world, what a blessing to have Shamsie and writers like her placing themselves behind our own eyes, offering books to stretch our moral imagination to meet the challenges of our times.
Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com
