by Hasan Altaf The cards are laid on the table right away in Shehan Karunatilaka's stunning debut novel, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (Graywolf Press). The narrator, W. G. Karunasena – an aging, alcoholic former sportswriter, who has just been handed what amounts to a death sentence (if he limits himself to two drinks a…

by Hasan Altaf The title of Joe Sacco's Journalism (Metropolitan Books, 2012) ostensibly refers simply to the book's contents, the collection of the author's shorter reported pieces. Filed from the Hague, from Chechnya and Palestine, from Iraq, they have been published over the past few years in various magazines and newspapers, including Details, Harper's and…

by Hasan Altaf If you search on Google or Wikipedia for “Pierre Bourdieu,” the results will paint you a picture of a man who was very much a theorist, an intellectual in the fullest sense of the word. Bourdieu contributed to the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and politics; he was influenced by…

by Hasan Altaf One of the few reliable characteristics of the institutions of the government of Pakistan is that they will only rarely stick to their mandates, that they will only occasionally consider themselves bound to fulfill their theoretical functions – the idea of the “public servant,” for example, seems to have passed ours by…

by Hasan Altaf The poet Kabir died in 1518, so it is jarring to open a translation of his writings and read the following line: “O pundit, your hairsplitting's/so much bullshit.” It is even stranger to look up and realize that the poem bears an epigraph (“It take a man that have the blues so…

by Hasan Altaf Let England Shake (2011), the eighth album by the English singer PJ Harvey, was by itself already high concept: In the music industry in the twenty-first century, releasing an album that focuses so explicitly on history – on war, on England, on England and its wars – seems like a particularly dangerous…

by Hasan AltafOne of the main differences between fiction and nonfiction might be, to use the phrase of writing workshops, between showing and telling: Fiction shows us other lives, what those other lives are like, how it might feel to be living those lives; the other tells us, laying out the context, the backstory, the…

by Hasan Altaf The set design of Mariano Pensotti's El pasado es un animal grotesco (“The Past is a Grotesque Animal” — the title comes, according to Pensotti, from a song by the band Of Montreal) seems at first just a conceit, one of those clever tricks that make a play experimental or avant-garde: The…

by Hasan Altaf When I was in graduate school, in Baltimore, one of the poems I had to teach my own students was Robinson Jeffers's “The Purse-Seine.” Among both my classmates and the undergraduates it was one of the least popular poems, which should perhaps have been no surprise, since we were encouraged to use…

by Hasan Altaf In their outlines, all of Joan Didion's novels seem more or less the same: The protagonist is always a woman, in some way “troubled”; there are always men, usually two, usually powerful in some way; there is sometimes a son but always a daughter, who is generally what the woman is “playing…

by Hasan Altaf One of the reviews of the 2010 film Reflections of a Blender (directed by André Klotzel from a script by José Antônio de Souza), in O Estado de São Paulo, describes it as “not a realistic film, but one that takes place in a real world in which poetic license is necessary…

by Hasan Altaf Looking back, I'm not sure how I got through my entire education, studying literature and writing, without ever really reading Greek drama; there was of course Shakespeare; Chaucer, at one point; I even have a vague memory of the Jataka tales, but no teacher or professor ever had me read or think…

by Hasan Altaf It seems like everyone I speak to has loved Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and the reviews have also been generally glowing. My search for someone who shared my less rapturous feeling has so far been largely fruitless, and at this point I am beginning to think that there might be something…

by Hasan Altaf If I were to describe David Lester’s The Listener (Arbeiter Ring, 2011) as “a graphic novel about the Holocaust,” the immediate correlation drawn would be with Maus, by Art Spiegelman, an urtext of both the genre and the subject. The comparison would be unfair, and a disservice to Lester’s work; the description…

by Hasan Altaf When we talk about Pakistan, generally what we talk about is change. Most conversations will involve headshaking and sighs and riffs on the idea that things – take your pick: security, economy, culture, education, health – are “getting worse”; most conversations also will have one person to point out all the things…

by Hasan Altaf All throughout That Girl in Yellow Boots, Kalki Koechlin stomps around Bombay in a pair of mustard-yellow Doc Martens until, at the end, devoid of hope, dreams destroyed, illusions shattered, etc., she takes them off and climbs into a rickshaw clutching them to her chest. The Doffing Of The Boots turns out…

by Hasan Altaf Lately it seems we have revolution on the brain, so in that sense, Icíar Bollaín’s new film, También la lluvia (Even the Rain), came out in the US at the perfect moment. The context is different, the struggle and the outcomes are different, the actors and powers are different, but those differences…

by Hasan Altaf There is a scene in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America where two characters, Louis and Belize, sit in a coffeeshop and Louis goes off on a long digression about America, about why democracy has succeeded in America (“comparatively, not literally, not in the present”), power and race in America, politics and freedom…

by Hasan Altaf Several years ago now, in one of those brown-meets-white movies whose titles are as impossible to keep straight as their plots are predictable, the brown girl attempted to explain Bollywood movies to her white boyfriend. He asked, “So they’re like soap operas?” and she replied, “Basically… just with bigger bubbles.” I’ve forgotten…

by Hasan Altaf Reading about Pakistan has become, for me, a fraught experience. Every time I see the country mentioned in a headline, my first reaction – the news or analysis being so unending, and so uniformly disheartening – is to hold my breath. I don’t know how other people interpret our current ticking-time-bomb situation,…