The Wish Maker

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Overview

Unabridged CDs • 9 CDs, 11 hours

A major new international voice debuts with a sweeping story of love, friendship, and family ties that brings to life the turbulent world of modern Pakistan.

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More About This Book

Overview

Unabridged CDs • 9 CDs, 11 hours

A major new international voice debuts with a sweeping story of love, friendship, and family ties that brings to life the turbulent world of modern Pakistan.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

The turbulence of contemporary Pakistani politics is refracted through the intimate prism of a fractious extended family in this mature debut, written when the author was 23. Twenty-year-old Zaki Shirazi, his military father dead before he was born, is raised with his rebellious female cousin Samar Api in a Lahore household dominated by his liberal mother, Zakia, editor of a crusading women's magazine, and his strong-willed, culturally conservative grandmother, Daadi. The nimble two-track narrative shifts between post-9/11, when Zaki returns from college in Massachusetts for Samar's wedding, and his childhood in the early 1990s, around the time then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was deposed, an act that polarized the country. The political background frames Sethi's complex narrative, but the primary focus is on the family's relatively privileged-and often as argumentative as it is loving-household, providing Western readers with an insider's atmospheric take on a culture and a country much in the news these days. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Mike Peed
With this first-rate novel, Sethi joins an ever-expanding roster of gifted young Pakistani writers who, after graduating from Western universities, have returned home with an urgent need to explain their misunderstood country to a global audience…Though distinctly restrained, Sethi's prose evokes the comic mislocutions of Jonathan Safran Foer and the vertiginous mania of Zadie Smith.
—The New York Times
More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews
New York Times Book Review
With this first-rate novel, Sethi joins an ever-expanding roster of gifted young Pakistani writers who, after graduating from Western universities, have returned home with an urgent need to explain their misunderstood country to a global audience.
Library Journal

Change vs. stasis is one of several themes in this debut by political essayist Sethi. Zaki Shirazi comes home to Pakistan from his New England college to attend cousin Samar Api's wedding, observing the superficial, Western-influenced changes in Lahore yet realizing that, underneath the surface, life is much the same. Born months after his father's death in the Pakistani air force, Zaki is raised by and among strong women: his mother, Zakia, editor of a feminist journal; Daadi, his conservative paternal grandmother; Naseem, the nurturing servant of unquestioned loyalty; and Samar, a confusing blend of cousin, sister, and friend. Through the prism of Pakistan's tumultuous struggle toward democracy, Sethi examines three generations of lives informed by an inconstant cultural climate. The author deftly employs the eyes of a journalist to exquisitely detail daily life in Lahore but could have been encouraged to edit extraneous material that often prevents the narrative from flowing. Still, the popularity of recent novels out of Pakistan, including The Reluctant Fundamentalist and A Case of Exploding Mangoes, will warrant interest. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/1/09.]
—Sally Bissell

Kirkus Reviews
A dysfunctional family mirrors a dysfunctional nation in Sethi's unfocused debut. The novel ends where it begins, with Zaki Shirazi arriving in Lahore, Pakistan, for the wedding of his cousin Samar Api some years after 9/11. Now a college student in Massachusetts, Zaki grew up with Samar, who was his closest childhood companion. They lived in his grandmother's house in Lahore. Daadi, a forceful old woman, agreed with her younger sister Chhoti, Samar's mother, that the little girl was better off in the city than in the repressive, conservative village of Chhoti's old-fashioned husband. As for Zaki, "I had been given to Daadi as compensation for the death of her son," he tells us. His father, a Pakistani air force pilot, died in a flying accident before his birth, and his mother is a devoted journalist but a negligent parent. We seem to be headed for a coming-of-age story about Zaki, or perhaps Samar, but their narratives have many gaps, and a big chunk of the novel concerns Zaki's mother, who also lives on sufferance in Daadi's house. Zakia-her husband wanted the boy named after her-is the most interesting character. A progressive, cutting-edge reporter focusing on the subjugation of women (the novel's half-buried theme), she's a supporter of Benazir Bhutto but becomes disillusioned when Bhutto achieves power. Sethi's unenlightening references to the volatile world of Pakistan's politics-hardly more sophisticated than, "today democracy, tomorrow martial law"-are jarringly juxtaposed with the soap-opera story of a teenage confidante who steals Samar's boyfriend. Zaki performs acts of vandalism to get his mother's attention; Samar is punished for her alleged loose living and returned to herfather's feudal homeland. But Sethi muffles the drama inherent in his characters' troubled lives: Samar's exile is reported after the fact, and when Zaki is involved in the school fight of his life, the circumstances are as murky as the author's prose. Commendably ambitious, but this young Pakistani author has bitten off more than he can chew.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781594488757
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
  • Publication date: 6/11/2009
  • Pages: 432
  • Product dimensions: 6.42 (w) x 9.24 (h) x 1.38 (d)

Meet the Author

Ali Sethi

Ali Sethi grew up in Pakistan in a family of dissenting journalists and publishers. A recent Harvard graduate, he has contributed to The New York Times and The Nation among other publications. He currently lives in Lahore.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Posted August 3, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    An Incredible Debut - Personal, Stirring, and even Comic

    A childhood story so personal it wasn't until the end that I remember it is not an autobiography. I was even more surprised to learn Ali Sethi is only 25 (like Carson McCullers who wrote her surprising debut at the age or 23).

    The setting is 1980's and modern-day Pakistan, amidst political chaos - from when generals ruled through censorship, torture, and fear to Bhutto's democratic, yet tumultuous leadership, and finally to a culturally-diverse Massachusetts college.

    We follow Zaki through a childhood surrounded by strong, opinionated women (his father dies as a Pakistani Air Force pilot before he is even born). He grows up alongside his romantic cousin, Samir Api, sharing secrets and heartbreaks. His liberal, outspoken mother publishes the Women's Journal and is even arrested with Zaki during a demonstration. There is the simple, sweet housemaid, Naseem, who watches sports on TV and talks about faith and God, and of course the conservative and opposing paternal grandmother - Daadi - and her two always-agreeable daughters, Suri & Hukmi, Zaki's aunts.

    The result is a narrator who takes in a 360-degree point of view of the world that opens up our eyes.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted June 15, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    Compensation for Revolution!

    Pakistan in the 1990's - a time of encroaching Western culture intermingling with traditional ways, sometimes in strident conflict, sometimes winning with subtlety, sometimes being quashed by the more fundamentalist Islamic and political violence. This is the world of Zaki Shirazi, a boy caught between both extremes of obedience to the old or new, and his cousin, Samar Api. It is the latter's voice that serves as the protagonist in this richly descriptive tale of Pakistani life. While the plot develops quite slowly, the description of clothing, jewelry, food, flowers, forests, stores, bazaars, and more are the highlights of the lengthy descriptions offered to the reader, a panoply of sensory elements one begins to actually imagine as being real in one's own world.

    Smatterings of history enter with mixed to the Bhutto government and demise, the Muslim suffering in the Bosnian War and so much more. Little by little, the reader begins to realize what a "revolution" to democracy really means to people uneducated and unwilling initially to challenge the despotic status quo. Education, though, teaches one to "see" in new ways, as the narrator muses. In another place, the evolution into a new government and new way of living resembles an appropriately offered metaphor of courting squirrels chasing an erratic spiral down the bark of a tree. You decide which characters are scrambling or sauntering down that tough, bark-like journey to a changed Pakistan.

    In another place, the reader is shocked when marriages borne out of love don't survive, an event that forces the reader to realize the enigma of embracing Western culture, a force that sometimes yields effects and affects far beyond the imagination.

    The Wish Maker has been compared to Kite Runner, but this reviewer thinks that is like comparing apples and oranges, the latter a more violent foray into revolution and the former a sweeter, full, rich journey through ordinary, every-day life in a world unique to itself and still in the throes of change to this day. More about political and religious conflict would have filled this novel out, not for readers wanting sensationalism and stereotypical ideas confirmed, but for the essence of what opposing sides really thought and said during these notably challenging times in Pakistan's 1990s.

    Interesting story, with a portrait-like presentation of people and their little-known but fascinating world!

    Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on June 15, 2009

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted October 2, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

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