The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

January 1, 2019
A larger-than-life character whose musings, history, and adventures animate a rich, complex city.Overweight and anxious, 70 years old, unmarried, and afflicted with terrible hemorrhoids, Abdullah, known as the Cossack, the middle son of five, has grown from a sensitive child through a wastrel youth into a self-educated, self-styled academic now burdened with a sense of mortality. His home is Currachee, or Karachi, the city in Pakistan, more specifically Sunset Lodge, the sizable house that was his childhood home, now shared with brother Babu, Babu's wife, and their two children--the Childoos--whom Abdullah adores. Loquacious verging on garrulous, Abdullah narrates this self-mocking, wildly discursive, and often comic narrative dotted inexhaustibly with footnotes and archly grandiose chapter titles, like "On Negotiating Ontological Panic (or Down & Out)." From the welter of observations and digressions on poetry, religion, hotels, morality, metaphysics, digestion, and much more, multiple narrative strands slowly emerge. A jazz trumpeter nicknamed the Caliph of Cool, one of Abdullah's acquaintances, asks Abdullah to take his grandson, Bosco, under his wing and build his character. Simultaneously, Abdullah makes a new friend, Jugnu, who, despite her gangster-boss protector, becomes the object of Abdullah's amorous aspirations. And then there's the family, several members of whom are in dispute with Abdullah over the future of Sunset Lodge. A love story, a caper, a family dust-up, a farce--prizewinning Pakistani writer Naqvi's (Home Boy, 2009) second novel offers all these things, yet they matter less than its lovingly evoked milieu, the uniquely vibrant neighborhoods and characters, culture, history, architecture, and aromas of the city.Infused with the spirit of Tristram Shandy, a sophisticated shaggy dog story for those happy to take the slow road and its many detours.

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Starred review from January 1, 2019
On his seventieth birthday, Abdullah Shah Ghazi twice refrains from throwing himself off the balcony of the Lodge, his family home in Karachi. He's a fat, diabetic bachelor with gout, the third of five sons of a once-prominent family, a phenomenologist who has little to show for his life. But he does have a way with words, and, before long, he finds reasons to continue living. He takes on a ward, Bosco, a friend's adolescent grandson in potential danger from the Mafia; he is entranced by and contemplates marrying the enigmatic Jugnu, who has Mob connections; he must defend the decaying Lodge from his brothers, who want it sold and demolished; and he must pursue writing his long-delayed project, The Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi. In a departure from his lauded debut novel, Home Boy (2009), Naqvi here delivers his promised big, bad comic epic. This exuberant account, featuring a protagonist as unlikely as he is appealing, is a true pleasure for its language and discourses on life, death, and what's in between. The footnotes that stud the narrative and the appended family tree and glossary are both entertaining and erudite, as is this unusual novel itself.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)