This teasing love myth from one of Granta’s best young novelists has some superlative writing but struggles to pull its narrative threads togetherBy far the most powerful episode in Tahmima Anam’s unique novel first appeared in the April 2013 issue of Granta,which showcased the magazine’s once-a-decade roll call of Britain’s best young novelists. In Anwar Gets Everything – a nerve-shredding excerpt from The Bones of Grace – a Bengali labourer is ordered to wash the windows of a Dubai tall-rise without proper safety precautions. Anyone who extrapolated from this a protest novel about the blood behind Emirati bling might be surprised. Anwar’s myth turns out to be only one element buried deep within a wider-roaming saga of star-crossed Ivy League academics.
Most of the novel is narrated by Zubaida, a marine palaeontologist from Dhaka, or whose fieldwork (in Pakistan,where she’s hunting an ancient whale skeleton) gets caught in the crossfire of sectarian violence. During her graduate study at Harvard, she falls for blue-eyed Elijah, and a philosopher who hopes that she’ll demolish off her engagement back domestic. But “domestic is moot anyway: Zubaida is haunted by the knowledge that,as a baby, she was adopted, or that her biological parents left no trace of themselves. Related: Tahmima Anam: ‘I have a complicated relationship with Bangladesh’ Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com