Prashant Keshavmurthy in the Asian Review of Books:
Fifteen years into his marriage, Noor Mohammad Ganju has never seen his wife naked. He lusts after her but sex, when she occasionally obliges him, is reduced by veils—literal and symbolic—to tedious and unimaginative coupling in the dark.
Negotiating with multiple folds of crumpled sheets, he would wander through the fluffy confusion, etching a figure in his mind, reading zips and buttons … At last, she would let him pull her shalwar half down and he would perform a missionary in her midwife position; a pantomime of awkward limbs and dull weight.
This early passage sets the tone for Sarmad Sehbai’s novel The Blessed Curse that, in 25 relatively short and vivid chapters, tells the increasingly absurdist story of the lengths to which a politically and militarily powerful trio of men will go to swell their ever-flagging male potency. The country is never named but is recognizably Sehbai’s home nation of Pakistan in which he has been, since the 1970s, esteemed as a poet and playwright in Urdu and Punjabi and as head of PTV’s theater department.
More here.
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