A Golden Age

January 28, 2008
Anam's account of a widow living in East Pakistan in the early 1970s just as the country erupts into war is a moving tale that narrator Madhur Jaffrey manages to connect with on a very personal level. Aside from a brief musical intro that helps to capture central character Rehana Haque's sheer joy upon awakening one sunny morning, the reading is an interpersonal experience. Jaffrey's grainy British accent takes on a hint of the rolling Pakistani dialect, with her pronunciation pitch perfect and realistic. Jaffrey seems legitimately attached to the story, as she captures the melancholy that Haque cannot avoid throughout the story. Her performance enhances characters that are already textured and rich with personality. There is a certain loneliness in Jaffrey's omniscient narrator, a characteristic that allows the listener to paint a clear and vivid portrait of a fantastic journey that is as heartbreaking as it is inspiring Simultaneous release with the Harper hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 17).

Starred review from September 17, 2007
The experiences of a woman drawn into the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence illuminate the conflict's wider resonances in Anam's impressive debut, the first installment in a proposed trilogy. Rehana Haque is a widow and university student in Dhaka with two children, 17-year-old daughter Maya and 19-year-old son Soheil. As she follows the daily patterns of domesticity—cooking, visiting the cemetery, marking religious holidays—she is only dimly aware of the growing political unrest until Pakistani tanks arrive and the fighting begins. Suddenly, Rehana's family is in peril and her children become involved in the rebellion. The elegantly understated restraint with which Anam recounts ensuing events gives credibility to Rehana's evolution from a devoted mother to a woman who allows her son's guerrilla comrades to bury guns in her backyard and who shelters a Bengali army major after he is wounded. The reader takes the emotional journey from atmospheric scenes of the marketplace to the mayhem of invasion, the ruin of the city, evidence of the rape and torture of Hindus and Bengali nationalists, and the stench and squalor of a refugee camp. Rehana's metamorphosis encapsulates her country's tragedy and makes for an immersive, wrenching narrative.