Michael Gorra in the New York Times:
The police in authoritarian states are expected and assumed to be corrupt, and ditto for lawyers, judges and the military. But doctors? Apparently so. Late in the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif’s fourth novel, Dr. Pervez Alam Pervez is described by an army inquisitor as “the finest post-mortem artist in the entire district. Bring him a body and he’ll give you the exact cause of death you want.” Drowning? Suicide? Just name it and he’ll produce the proper autopsy report, whatever will best help dispose of an inconvenient corpse.
This kind of gallows humor has driven Hanif’s work ever since his first novel, “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” (2008), a comedy about the 1988 death of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
More here.
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