The Golden Legend: A novel

by Nadeem Aslam

Overview

When shots ring out on the Grand Trunk Road in the fictional Pakistani city of Zamara, Nargis’s life begins to crumble around her. Soon her husband—and fellow architect—is dead and, under threat from a powerful military intelligence officer, she fears that a long-hidden truth about her past will be exposed. For weeks someone has been broadcasting people’s secrets from the minaret of the local mosque, and, in a country where even the accusation of blasphemy is a currency to be bartered, the mysterious broadcasts have struck fear in Christians and Muslims alike. A revelatory portrait of the human spirit, in The Golden Legend, Nadeem Aslam gives us a novel of Pakistan’s past and present—a story of corruption and resilience, of love and terror, and of the disguises that are sometimes necessary for survival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101973387
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	659,201
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan and now lives in England. He is the author of four previous novels, most recently The Blind Man’s Garden. His work has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and has won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Encore Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Golden Legend"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Nadeem Aslam.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about The Golden Legend, the searingly beautiful new novel from Nadeem Aslam, acclaimed author of The Blind Man’s Garden.

1. Disguise and deception are central themes of The Golden Legend. Discuss the ways in which the novel’s characters deceive those around them. Why do they feel the need to keep secrets? What are the consequences of their deception?

2. The Hanged Mutineer’s tree is the last almond tree in Badami Bagh. It grows in Helen and Lily’s courtyard, but it is burned down in the violent aftermath of the announcement from the minaret revealing Lily and Aysha’s relationship. Examine the symbolism of this tree. How did it get its name?

3. Discuss the role that the book by Massud’s father, entitled That They Might Know Each Other, plays in The Golden Legend. What is That They Might Know Each Other about? What happens to Nargis and Massud’s copy? How is that book connected to the title of Aslam’s novel?

4. What is the Hagia Sophia? What is the Córdoba Mosque? Why might Nargis and Massud have chosen to hang models of these religious structures from their ceiling? Why does Helen find the models so comforting? 

5. Explore the relationship among religion, power, and freedom as it is depicted in The Golden Legend.

6. Who was Massud’s brother? How did he die? Why does Nargis evoke his memory when Major Burhan visits her house for the first time?

7. Analyze the relationship between the United States and Pakistan as it is portrayed in the novel. How are the tensions between the two nations evident in the aftermath of Massud’s death? How does the military-intelligence agency contribute to this dynamic?

8. Discuss Imran’s past. Where did he grow up, and what was the political situation like there? Why did he decide to join the training camp, and what made him leave? How does his previous involvement with this militant group continue to affect his life today?

9. The mosque on the island in the Vela River becomes a safe haven for Nargis, Helen and Imran as they try to evade capture by the police. Describe the mosque and the landscape around it. Why is the mosque now in disuse? In what ways does it represent the Pakistan that Nargis and Massud, who designed it, hoped for?

10. Discuss the bond that forms between Helen and Imran. What do they have in common? Why do you think they develop such an intense connection?

11. Compare and contrast Nargis’s life before and after she decides to live as a Muslim. What does she gain? What does she lose? Do you think she regrets her decision?

12. Explore the motif of flowers in the novel. When and where do flowers appear? What does their appearance suggest about the endurance of beauty?

13. Describe the novel’s treatment of radical Islam. Which characters are connected to extremism? How do their beliefs and actions impact both Christian and Muslim members of the community? What motivates them? What does the novel suggest about the lengths to which extremist movements will go?

14. On page 283, Major Burhan tells Bishop Solomon, “I would do anything for Pakistan,” to which Bishop Solomon responds, “For the Pakistani state, perhaps. Not the Pakistani people.” What does Bishop Solomon mean by this?

15. Why does Bishop Solomon commit suicide in a courtroom? What might his suicide represent to the Christian citizens of Pakistan?

16. Ghosts are ever present throughout the novel. In what sense is Badami Bagh, as well as the people who live there, haunted by the past?

17. Discuss the conclusion of the novel. What happens to Helen and Imran? To Lily and Aysha? To Nargis? Is the tone of the ending hopeful or despairing? What do the final pages suggest about the future of Pakistan and the possibility of justice?

Editorial Reviews

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and LitHub

“Powerful and engrossing. . . . [Aslam] writes with great sensitivity and depth.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning. . . . [The Golden Legend is] masterful and compelling fiction, intricately layering symbols and parallels, unspooling its plot in dramatic twists until the very last sentence.” —The Boston Globe
 
“A powerful and timely comment on the precarious state of religious minorities in Pakistan and an honest mirror to the Pakistani state and society.” —The Washington Post

“Beautifully imagined.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Remarkable. . . . The Golden Legend is extravagant with imagery and elaborate with metaphor.” —The Economist

“A heart-pounding and timely novel about kinship and resilience.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“A magical book. . . . Aslam’s writing is lyrical and expansive. . . . He’s a brilliant novelist, one of two or three truly great writers in the world today. His work reminds me of Orhan Pamuk at an earlier stage of his career. And, yes, like Pamuk, Nadeem Aslam ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.” —Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch
 
“At once a coming-of-age love story, a study of loss, and a lucid portrait of the conflicts pervading contemporary Pakistan. . . . Aslam’s crystalline prose and emotionally nuanced characters give his novel a wide resonance. . . . Though unsparing in its depiction of the brutal exercise of power, this is also a paean to human resilience.” —Financial Times
 
“Aslam has quietly built up a body of work quite unlike that of any other novelist, detailing the worst that humans can do in prose that suggests the redemptive possibilities of art. Horror and beauty are held in precarious balance in The Golden Legend.” —Peter Parker, The Spectator
 
“Mesmerizing . . . other-worldly astonishing. Superlatives feel downright insufficient.” —The Christian Science Monitor

From the Publisher

★ 02/27/2017
Aslam’s exquisite, luminous novel is set in the imaginary city of Samara, somewhere in northern Pakistan between Kashmir and the border of Afghanistan. Nargis, an architect, has lost her husband, Massud, to a rogue American bullet, which hit him as he passed books in a human chain to a new library that he and Nargis designed. Their Christian ex-servant, Lily, and his daughter, Helen, whom Nargis and Massud have nurtured intellectually and whose mother was murdered by a Muslim, live next door. Helen falls in love with a Kashmiri named Imran, who turns up at Nargis’s house one day, having escaped from a group of jihadists with whom he trained. Bigotry frequently erupts into violence in their district, and each of these characters will suffer. Nargis is pressured by a military intelligence agent to forgive her husband’s murderer for blood money. Helen is pursued for blasphemous journalism. Lily, a Christian, and his lover, the widowed daughter of a local Muslim cleric, are exposed and pursued by a mob, which burns down their neighborhood. Lily disappears, and Nargis, Helen, and Imran flee to a secluded island, where they begin a strange but lovely idyll of love and friendship that sharply contrasts with what surrounds them. Hidden, the three lovingly repair a book written by Massud’s father that was torn to pieces by the authorities, using golden thread to stitch its pages together again. The Pakistan depicted in this harrowing novel is unbearably wrenched apart by terror and prejudice, but the dignity of Aslam’s (The Blind Man’s Garden) characters and their devotion to one another rises far above the violence. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/15/2017
On the day of his death, Massud awoke to the muezzin's call to prayer and the smell of baking bread, a fragrance, he had read, that instills kindness in human beings. There are many acts of generosity in this exquisite novel, though they are equaled by the treachery and corruption common to this Punjab region of northern Pakistan, where Muslims and Christians live warily side by side. Massud's grieving widow, Nargis, refuses to accept blood money from the state in exchange for her absolution of the American who shot her husband, causing the authorities to investigate this difficult woman, who may be harboring a blasphemous secret. Her intransigence draws adverse scrutiny to the Christian family who lives next door, a young woman named Helen and her widowed father, Lily, who is in a forbidden relationship with the imam's daughter. Through the reminiscences of each of these deeply sympathetic characters, Aslam (The Blind Man's Garden; The Wasted Vigil) elucidates the history of occupation and division that has influenced Pakistan's current climate of religious intolerance. VERDICT Man Booker Prize long-listed and Dublin short-listed Aslam uses lush, sensuous prose to create beauty from ugliness, calm from chaos, and love from hatred, offering hope to believers and nonbelievers alike. This thoughtful, thought-provoking read will enthrall lovers of international fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 10/17/16.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Library Journal

★ 2017-02-05
"This world is the last thing God will ever tell us": an aching, lyrical story of schisms and secrets in present-day Pakistan.Nargis has something to tell, a secret that she has been carrying for a lifetime. "She had succeeded in concealing herself in the false story she had constructed," writes Aslam (The Blind Man's Garden, 2013, etc.), having already suggested why there are many good reasons to hide inside inventions in a Pakistan that is increasingly torn apart by sectarian strife, the muezzin's call punctuated by denunciations of romance across religious lines as gentle young scholars rush to join the jihadis. There is much violence: Nargis' Christian housekeepers are still mourning the loss of one of their own, murdered by a man just recently freed from prison as a reward for having memorized the Quran, and now Nargis must deal with grief herself, her husband caught in the crossfire of a gunfight involving a "large healthily built white man." She has barely a moment to mourn when Pakistani military intelligence agents are at her door to demand that she forgive the American for the death—a demand that carries the implication that if she does not comply, her secret will come spilling out to destroy the rest of her family. Aslam's story has all the gravity of a tragedy and one of many dimensions: Nargis' island retreat, once a place of calm where a church and a Hindu temple stood alongside a mosque, is riven by people seeking difference in the place of similarity, as she wonders, "Which God or Gods had built that world?" And indeed, tucked away inside Aslam's quietly unwinding narrative are snippets of and allusions to religious tales that speak to the wisdom of earlier days—the title itself is one of them—against the unwisdom of our own. Brooding and beautiful: a mature, assured story of the fragility of the world and of ourselves.

Kirkus Reviews