We need to speak about Alice. Alice, with her black hair as well as big mouth. With her beautiful physique as well as bad incentive control. Alice, criminal as well as savior, a plant as well as heroine of "Our Lady of Alice Bhatti," a deft, immorality little novel of comic genius by Mohammed Hanif, writer of a prizewinning "Case of Exploding Mangoes."
Nirmra Bucha
Mohammed Hanif
OUR LADY OF ALICE BHATTI
By Mohammed Hanif
239 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $ 25.95.
Fresh out of jail as well as despite challenging odds, Alice Bhatti, a Catholic nurse in present-day Pakistan, has wrangled a job during Karachi's Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, a cesspit of gangrene as well as incompetence. The "delivery room is a gambling den," a head nurse says. "Everyone comes out a loser." The maternity sentinel itself goes by a grim sobriquet "baby slaughterhouse."
But there's something about Alice. She possesses unnerving gifts: puzzling recovering powers as well as a capability to envision how you will die. She works miracles, is beloved by a residents of a psychiatric ward, though nothing, not even her supernatural ability set, can stem a tide of a passed women:
"There was not a singular day not a singular day when she didn't see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, hermit protecting his honor, father protecting his honor, son protecting his honor, jilted lover avenging his honor, feuding farmers settling their H2O disputes, moneylenders pciking up their interest: many of life's arguments, it seemed, got settled by you do various things to a woman's body."
"A Case of Exploding Mangoes," Hanif's initial! novel, drew auspicious comparisons to "Catch-22" both have been severe sendups of hold up in a air forces, though a similarities run deeper. Like Joseph Heller, Hanif specializes in a kind of horror as well as humor joined during a root. Stripped of a slapstick as well as sorcery realist special effects, "Alice Bhatti" is a blistering broadside upon a socially sanctioned gorcery of women as well as girls in Pakistan. It's an abecedary of how women have been hunted, how they're choked as well as chopped up as well as thrown away. It's an attempt to assimilate as well as render, with varying degrees of success, what hold up is similar to underneath encircle from a world's oldest, many deadly kind of terrorism. "Cutting up women is a sport comparison than cricket though only as popular as well as similarly full of obscure rituals as well as intricate rules," Hanif writes.
Alice's physique is a bridgehead underneath consistent assault by "lewd gestures, whispered suggestions, uninvited hands upon her bottom." In every scene though one, someone is ogling her, poking or prodding or spiteful her. And oddly enough, a writer joins a ranks of those who can't get sufficient of her substantial charms: "Alice's physique is a single of those miracles of malnourishment, that has resulted in a thin, brittle bone make up with disproportionate breasts," Hanif writes. Alice Bhatti's breasts, once conjured, have been ubiquitous, as well as they enthuse a little terrible, slavering similes. They have been "like Persian cantaloupes that only grow in a dried as well as die if it rains some-more than once every season." They have been observed as well as again, these have been breasts, mind you "cuddling themselves, similar to dual abandoned puppies confusing any other for their mother."
But hang on. Didn't I refer to this book as a work of "comic genius"? It is, these breast-related infelicities aside. Hanif is Andrea Dworkin-earnest upon a topic of violence opposite women, though all else is fair game. He's a puni! sher in a style of Yahweh, Flannery O'Connor as well as Muriel Spark; he's a moralist trussed up as torturer (or is it a other approach around?), with a taste for creation his creations twitch. No a single emerges unscathed. Eyes have been popped out of sockets, penises have been slashed, flies walk lightly into a open mouths of sleeping women. Wild dogs give chase; flower pots have been put to rarely unusual uses.
Parul Sehgal is an editor during a Book Review.
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