(Quick impression of the first few pages, not a review.)

Here’s an excerpt from Marsha Mehran’s Rosewater and Soda Bread, an Iranian-Irish novel not nearly as interesting as it could have been. It begins with yet another exotic-female-meets-white-guy-at-her-ethnic-restaurant cliché like The Mistress of Spices, Chocolat, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and so on. An Irish character is stereotyped just as baldly, and the Farsi is relegated to italics.

But Hindi speakers will recognize the vocab, and the folk wisdom around haldi may sound familiar:

Bahar had always had an unpredictable mixture of garm (hot) and sard (cold) coursing through her veins… [Marjan decided] she’d stick to the gormeh sabzi she had made today…

But another garm dish was needed… something like like stuffed eggplants with turmeric-encrusted lamb. A poor man’s saffron to some, turmeric… The spice, when cooked with dark meats, tended to unseen inflammations in the body which, if left untreated, could mark the beginnings of disease…

‘Somehow I can’t imagine Paddy’s offering chelow with their Guinness.’

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A wind-up Hanuman scoops up prescription meds on the cover of Cheeni Rao’s Chicago crack addict memoir, In Hanuman’s Hands:

When Mr. Rao’s mother feels powerless to help her drug-addict son any longer — his being kicked out of college for drug-dealing was just the beginning of the misery — she entrusts his fate to the hands of Hanuman… “My father had abandoned our ancestral temple and forgotten how to hear the Gods.” While Mr. Rao is being treated in a hospital for a drug overdose, with activated charcoal being pumped into his stomach, he has a revelation: His family is cursed by the gods for having strayed from Kashmir and from Hinduism… “In the past, when my ancestors tended the temples, the Gods spoke to them… I would need to find a God that would forgive me.” The search would take years, he says, “but I finally found one in Chicago in an alley behind a taqueria.” [WSJ]

The cover is a mashup of Eastern religion and druggie confessional, and the tale comes with the James Frey disclaimer:

The book is not “a good, old-fashioned memoir,” he warns in a note to the reader; it falls instead “between the myths we call memories and then proclaim as fact…” [WSJ]

I’m going to hope this exoticist recrudescence isn’t representative of the rest of the book. And wonder whether Rao ever faced off with Sudhir Venkatesh across the Robert Taylor projects.

From East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s collection of Delhi-New York stories:

When Farid found her, Farida really was sitting under a tree. She was in a pure white sari, and she looked the way she always did: supremely elegant…

They had always had showdowns… In their youth these upheavals had ended in excited lovemaking… They lived in misery. Their flat was horribly cramped and always smelled of cabbage and mutton from their English neighbors’ cooking… the odors of Farida’s scents and lotions and of the dregs of Farid’s drinks… he had known just how to wind her up so that she flashed and blazed in a pleasurable way…

When they had been in London… she decided to organize a line of… samosas, pakoras, kebabs to be sold in the delicatessen departments of leading London stores… She had bought a wholesale supply of cardboard boxes…. packed them with delicacies she had fried, and spent the rest of the day delivering them to the stores… she was exhausted from her hours of cooking, and from her slow and expensive delivery rounds… the cost of the ingredients, the packaging and the taxi were destroying the profit she had expected… [Farid] seized her pan, carried it into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet…

The next moment — well, it came twenty years later, but he had no intervening image — there she was, holy under a tree…

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Daniyal Mueenuddin’s San Francisco book reading last night was the quickest I’ve ever seen. The author seemed crisp rather than rushed, but from start to finish — a gilded introduction by a bookstore person, reading three passages, taking a handful of questions — he finished in half an hour on the dot.

Wearing close-cropped hair and a fitted black jacket, the youthful Mueenuddin doesn’t fit the stereotype of a shaggy literary lion. He has the kind of accent endemic to those who’ve split their time across countries, a hybrid of Pakistani and American English, pronouncing some words in perfect Urdu. Two of his selections were some of my favorite passages in the book, which makes him not just a good author but a reader with taste.

It never fails to amaze me how small the book reading scene is in cities outside New York. Mueenuddin may be a debutante, but he’s got plenty of literary buzz. Still, barely 30 people showed up to the City Lights reading room, a small upstairs alcove fitted with warm lighting and glowing hardwood floors. We had books signed and departed for burritos, profiteroles and cappuccino.

Related posts: Posh smoke, Better than the trailer, In other formats, other wonders

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders starts off in the machined, airless style typical of Jhumpa Lahiri’s shorts. It’s a bloodless, self-consciously arty gloss I can admire but not love. Midway through the linked stories, however, the author breaks out flashier scansion like china at a kudi nu vekhan.

And that’s when the book gets interesting. It’s not that Mueenuddin stops writing about the modest lives of the Punjabi underclass in a tone of impermanence and melancholy. His mien is restrained in these tales, tinged with resignation rather than resentment. But he interleaves them with stories about the elite, and though the vast gulf between the classes is off-putting, Mueenuddin feels freer here. He’s upper-class, though self-aware; he’s shared these experiences; a recurring character, the artsy, culturally adept American wife of a rich Pakistani landowner, is very much the story of his own mother.

If Mueenuddin has a weakness, it’s writing romance. The story ‘Lily’ contains great subtlety and psychological insight into a marriage, but at times it shades purple. Only a handful of authors like Michael Ondaatje can carry off taking themselves that seriously. Nadine Gordimer succeeds, but only for a short while; and when the dialogue is too pat and literary to be believable, it brings down the whole illusion. ‘Lily’ is admirably flawed, writing the relationship with the specificity of lived experience, and like The Namesake, it thrums with fear of libertine females:

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