Book Review: Udas Naslen by Abdullah Hussain

So first of all, I want to thank the team of Parhai Likhai for being so kind and sending me this lovely book. The delivery was prompt and the book so nicely packaged that it just filled my heart with so much happiness! Also, the book itself was very nice quality and reading it was an experience that I thoroughly enjoyed.

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Here’s my review of the book:

It is indeed one remarkable masterpiece of a book. Although reading it requires a little patience at the reader’s part as it can get a bit difficult at time. The excellence of this book, in my opinion, lies in how the author navigates through so many time periods, each significant in its own way, so effortlessly. Covering the time of the war of independence in 1857 to the post-partitipn Pakistan in 1947, the author makes his characters – or more precisely tge generations of those characters – inhabit and engage with the lives that they have been entrusted with and evolve as the time goes on. The best thing about Hussain’s writing style is that it does not reek of an overdose of sentimentality, and this makes it very different from the popular Urdu novels that we usually get to read. Moreover, this lack of show of expression makes it a very Modern novel.

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The characters of the Udas Naslen are as exceptional in nature as the writing style of the author. They are complex and very dynamic, changing and evolving with the progression of the plot. They’re neither good, nor entirely bad. They are also neither dispassionate nor overly attached with their surroundings and other characters. Our protagonist, a young village lad, and his fellow villagers get forcibly transported to the faraway lands in order to fight in the wars of their erstwhile colonial masters. The novel shows how this heavily traumatizes the young Indian soldiers, many of whom die unceremoniously in the foreign battlefields while their families die of famine as there is no one to tend to the crops back home. Hussain steers clear of overly-decorated and gaudy language, yet he definitely has his moments. There are bits that hit you right in the gut and take your breath away. I think this more due to the sincerity and genius with which he has sketched his characters than with the brilliance of the language itself. Because language in those sublime and philosophic passages too remains very simple and to-the-point.

Another merit of the work at hand its realistic depiction of the life before the partition. Hussain doesn’t bother to create either a rosy, overly romanticized picture of it, and neither does he attempt to push a dystopian image of the time down oir throats. He shows us the ugliness of it without forgetting to include the good parts, the mundane ones, the ones required to make life bearable and also believable.

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I could spot so many Modern influences reverberating through his writing while reading the novel-You can definitely see Hemingway, Woolfe, and Eliot peeking throughout the book. Yet, the author has got his iconoclastic style of writing as well that does stand out from the rest of them.

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Once again, I must say that reading this book was really enjoyable. And that I’m happy that I was given this opportunity to read and review it.

Thanks!