A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna review – a woman’s ambitions in Pakistan

This novel fizzes with energy as it follows the parallel lives of two siblings and exposes the crushing divides of gender and classI admired Dur e Aziz Amna’s precise and lyrical first novel, American Fever; the protagonist – an exchange student from Pakistan to rural Oregon – staying with me long after I encountered her. She has now delivered a superb second novel that features another fascinating central character, though in a much darker, more disturbing context.A Splintering is the story of Tara, one of five siblings from a poor farming family in the hinterlands of Pakistani Punjab. This is the kind of landscape where age-old codes of manhood, with brother or son as provider and adjudicator of women’s lives, still rule. Tara, gazing at the stars from their courtyard at night, wants to get away from the squalor of Mazinagar (literally, past city), where most people live and die unnoticed, and build a life full of money and possessions in the city. She has no romantic notions about the soporific countryside. “I have no nobility. I come from darkness and filth.” Continue reading...

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