The premise of this book sounded too wacky for me to really enjoy. A center (the book takes its name to its most literal conclusion) where you learn a language like a sponge? I thought I would be getting some poorly attempted magical realism or a surprise turn into the realms of science fiction. Instead, what I got was a twist that I definitely did not see coming, and honestly I’m not sure I even wanted to?
Half the fun of discussing this book is that particular twist, but it’s too much of a spoiler to disclose it, so instead we’re going to have to depend upon the rest of the story, which veers very close into self-indulgent rambling territory. Honestly, it’s very interesting how the author manages to stuff our protagonist’s wide-flung thoughts on everything under the sun into the plot, and frankly speaking the plot didn’t do much to keep me engaged anyway. You’d think that a story where people are discovering the magical ability to speak fluently in less than two weeks would keep you hooked, but it was instead the particular demographics of our heroine, Anisa, that made it interesting for me. In particular, Anisa’s job as a translator, which merges so neatly into the editorial work I do navigating between the French and the English language.
It’s not that translation is a subjective process, exactly. In fact, in a way, it’s highly mathematical. It’s about retaining the feeling, the thing underneath. It’s as if you go underground, and there are all these shapes and colors, and there you see that, oh, died in this language is closest in color and shape, consistency and texture, to passed away in this other language. And it feels like a personal accomplishment when you make the match and haul the pair back up to the surface.
In fact, it was the simpler stuff in the story that resonated with me more than all the ridiculousness about the center and the magical language learning part of the narrative. Maybe some part of it was because of the obvious overlap in Anisa’s life and my own, but the parts I highlighted had more to do with Anisa and her very personal ways of living than with any of the science fiction twists within the story.
This was true even when Anisa achieved a level of fame I don’t relate to, and discovered that fame was a double-edged sword. Her navigation of the world after she has spent a few days at the center and learned a language in days was more interesting to me than the actual mystery of why she was able to learn the language in such a short period of time in the first place. The premise of the story, of course, hinges on you being intrigued by the inexplicable, but as Anisa achieved popularity as an author, I found myself wishing that the author had tried less to work with such a wacky plot line, and had instead kept the story simpler.
It was as if, overnight, my words mattered, even when they were, frankly, somewhat mundane or being uttered by a million others who were patronized or outright ignored. The same people who I’d previously been invisible to were now looking at me with something like awe. And not just awe, not always awe. I sometimes detected a kind of presumed beneficence in their gaze that reminded me of photographs of white missionaries in India. So proud were they of having a brown woman on their stage, of humbling themselves by taking her seriously.
Throughout the story, there were moments where the fact that the entire premise rested on a fantastical Center of language learning kept ruining the enjoyment of the book for me, because otherwise there were lots of other things done well. Unlike the majority of the Pakistani dramas we see on our TV screen, Anisa had complex relationships with the other women in her life that weren’t necessarily defined by fighting over a man. These ranged from friendly to sexual, and as someone who has been surrounded by women at every stage in her life, it is always gratifying for me to see the heroines in the books I read value the women they know, or to engage with them in multifaceted ways.
We form these elaborate fantasies of romantic partnerships, Romeos and Majnus who we’ll spend our days and nights with in a passion of rose petals and fireworks, while discounting our non-romantic relationships (if such distinctions can even be made), often more enduring and authentic. We discard them as soon as some man comes along, flashing his teeth and brandishing his penis. But it’s always the friends in the end, isn’t it, who remain to pick up the pieces when the men have gone, leaving destruction in their wake? Still, only the romantic partner is taken seriously. Friends and family will not gather, ever, to celebrate my partnership with Naima—there will be no anniversaries or acknowledgments, no congratulatory cards, no celebratory ceremonies. And yet, it is this slow burning love of female friendship that actually keeps the world turning.
Of course, to enjoy a book solely on the basis of the character and not on the plot is a weak plan at best, because it all falls apart when the character is unable to withstand that particular scrutiny. In my case, it was ruined by the very obvious stink of privilege that surrounded Anisa, a privilege that she seemed to be aware of, but brushed under the rug instead of facing that discomfort head on. This is, of course, par for the course for most people in real life, who are unable to look at their comfortable, moneyed self in the eyes, for fear of having to admit that they’ve barely had a hand in achieving that level of ease. But the book never really tackled the possibility of delving deeper into the rich, layered discussion that could have occurred around how Anisa managed to afford the expensive course at the Center in the first place.
“Two thousand.”
“Oof. Pricey. But worth it, sounds like? If it works.”
The course was actually, of course, twenty thousand, not two, but I didn’t know how to say this to Naima. I felt like the number would sound inconceivable to her, or that she’d look at me differently, somehow, if she knew. I’d like to think that my obfuscation was a gesture of empathy, but I don’t know, maybe it was a dickhead move. Maybe, through these small erasures, which we tell ourselves are “polite” or whatever, we’re covering up a vast network of structural inequality. Who knows. It’s just what came to me in the moment, and I felt my cheeks redden even as I said it.
This idea, of a potential for awkward things to be addressed, or uncomfortable opinions confronted head on, existed throughout the story but didn’t really seem to ripen into anything substantial. There were discussions on colonialism and immigration, on feminism and the patriarchy, but it felt more like the author was constrained by the word count and her own inability to decide exactly which thread she wanted to focus on more. What that meant was a disparate jumble of throwaway comments weakly added onto what should ideally have been a taut, engaging story but was instead a collection of interesting moments in an overall weak narrative.
“If I were a man,” she’d once said, “if I had the kind of freedom and independence they do, I would never get married. I don’t know why they do it."
In the end, it wasn’t the main character’s inability to hold my attention that was the problem, it was simply that there were too many questions left unanswered for me to truly enjoy the book. I wanted answers, if not only about Anisa’s bisexuality and the sexual assault scene and all the weird, messed up ways in which her own personal story unfolded, but more so about the Center and the twist in the tale that truly felt like something the author threw in simply because she couldn’t think of anything else. The questions I wanted resolved had less to do with Anisa’s future and rather with the Center itself, about its operation and its methodologies, about the science behind it all. In the end, there was only a sort of hand-wavy, just-assume-it-works sort of feel to the whole thing that I didn’t manage to suspend my disbelief for long enough to enjoy the tale.
It also didn’t help that there were obvious parts where I wished I had been the editor myself, if only to remove the weird issues I could find. Later on in the story it became obvious why the story would sometimes randomly shift into a conversational tone, but the trick felt more like the author making some hasty changes to the manuscript to bring it in line with last minute edits, rather than as part of a cohesive whole.
It’s not that our household in Karachi wasn’t also run using the labor of servants, but in Shiba’s home, it was like … I don’t know … a whole protocol thing.
Editorial anomalies such as these, along with the erratic breaking of the fourth wall and the similar speech patterns of each and every character, kept breaking me out of my enjoyment of the story and instead hurtling straight into editorial mode. One could argue that since the author is one person writing the dialogue, obviously all the characters will talk in the same manner, but it ended up rendering everyone into one vague mess of similarities that turned a great book into an OK one.
I chided myself for longing, even in my midthirties, for this imaginary, perhaps idealized, maternal love. But whatever. Broken heart emoji.
Overall, it was a good debut effort, but maybe not enough for me to fall in love with it. Honestly, I think this author could do with a better plot, and I’d be interested in reading her next one, but overall, I’d say one could skip this one with ease.