“ It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think? ”
No sight better expresses the politics of aid, the dynamics of the West and the developing countries, than the image of children, happy or in need.
~ Zia Haider Rahman
Everyone, he continued, wants his life to stand for something other than what it would, which is about eighty years – in the West, at any rate – eighty years of working, eating, sleeping, shitting, breeding, and dying. Lives of buttoning and unbuttoning – who said that?
Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.
Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it.
