Of Prizes and Pointlessness: Firuza Pastakia's 'The Universe is a Conscientious Garden' is pretty underwhelming as an award winner
This is part one of reviewing short stories which won The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which promotes science fiction and related genres of writing in Pakistan, and includes everything from regular science fiction and steampunk to magic realism and weird fiction. 'The Universe is a Conscientious Garden' was the first winner. Reviews for the other winners can be found here.
In my review for The Tallest Woman, the short story that won the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women, I mentioned how excited I was about the mere idea of awards given for local writing. As a person who likes to read and review Pakistani literature, there’s something very appealing to me about any attempt to promote and encourage said literature. But while The Tallest Woman laid to rest my fear that the first winner of an award might not be that good, ‘The Universe is a Conscientious Garden’ did the complete opposite and proved me completely right.
Every other Sunday
afternoon until she was eleven, Katy Cooper went to her grandmother’s for tea.
The beginning is interesting enough. A young girl spending
her days in her grandmother’s garden discovers a key, and then there’s a box,
and some magic, and it was by that point that I was scrolling down to check how
much of it was left. I simply couldn’t feel any interest. So much of the narrative
was disjointed, with no cohesive thought to turn it into a whole.
With stories like these, I sometimes used to wonder whether
it was just me and not necessarily the narrative. Given how I have come to
terms with the reality of my love-hate relationship with the short story
format, it wasn’t too big a stretch. But I find that I am no longer so forgiving
of poor narratives or futile characters because I have encountered short
stories that are amazing in terms of storytelling. And if they can exist, then
that means that there is simply no excuse for such poor storytelling.
It’s not that the story is truly horrible per say. It’s just
that it feels sort of pointless. And while I don’t expect literature to
necessarily educate me or change my worldview in new and amazing ways every
single time, I don’t believe it’s so unreasonable a request to ask for at least
some emotion created within us in response to the author’s words.
Unfortunately, what I mostly felt was a blank nothingness. I was neither
entertained nor curious. Throughout the whole story I kept waiting to get to
the part that would hook me in to the characters’ lives or troubles, and it
just never came.
But it’s entirely possible, and I’m willing to admit this
openly, that it wasn’t the story itself but the absolutely bonkers presentation
of it that ruined the experience. Honestly, halfway through the reading experience
I was forced to wonder what issue the website designers for the award had with
darker fonts. My poor eyes suffered terribly throughout the whole ordeal, and
reading the light grey text was such a chore. This was particularly irritating
to me because back when I was a new and fresh-faced editor, still believing
that it was only the text that mattered in a published book, it felt remarkable
to me how many of our conversations revolved around font size and colour and
paragraph formatting and so on and so forth. These little details which affect
your reading experience mostly remain invisible to the average reader, but in
the background these particulars are checked with a fine-tooth comb because so
much of it matters.
Honestly even the colour of the font wouldn’t have been as
big an issue if the random paragraph breaks hadn’t made an appearance. Whoever
did the final formatting of the website page was an idiot of a superior
quality, because lines broke off in between sentences and erratically jumped
onto the next one. Since these were so absolutely haphazard, I find it hard to
believe that this could have been the author’s intention, and can only blame
whoever placed this text on the website for this ridiculous error, which was
repeatedly generously throughout the text and infuriated me continuously.
Consider for a moment
the humble box and its peculiar properties. It is a thing in itself, an object
in its own right, deserving of an independent life and identity. Whether
punched and folded and stapled into shape from a sheet of cardboard or moulded
and filigreed and soldered from a slab of gold, a box is like an opening
sentence, a first step, a pre-meeting
meeting. For it to
exist, for its life to have a purpose, for it to be worth opening, a box must
contain something.
The reason I questioned myself at the abrupt stops the
sentences took in the middle of the page to jump to the next line was because
the author did, in fact, take a few creative liberties in her abundant usage of
clauses and/or phrases instead of sentences. And while I understand that the
whole point of fiction is to allow writers to use language in new and inventive
ways, I only find that I can forgive it when I am sufficiently impressed. And
impressed I was not, especially when I encountered spelling errors as well.
And when a misplaced
key mysteriously reappears, there are forces are work that are clamouring to be
heard.
How has such a short story, award winning and up on the
website, not been edited to remove these errors? The lack of professional
cleanliness was so bothersome. There was the promise of brilliance throughout
the story, coated in a thin veneer of the kind of flowery writing I used to
read in my university literature newsletter. The editor in me died a slow,
torturous death at the lack of a guiding hand. An author like this deserves
better, honestly, and I hope Firuza Pastakia finds one soon, because I can
easily admit that this same story would have worked better as a novella, or
even a full-length novel. There was potential, and then it was squandered.
Ordinary people are
not the stuff of history. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, what good
are their stories? They die and the world sighs and blinks and whizzes on
without them. Their histories, if they survive at all, are little more than
fragments, traces in the silence of a sentence, whispers in the lyrics of a
half- remembered song.
I genuinely think I would have enjoyed it more if the
formatting had been more rigorously checked. The same thing in a better font
style with better colour and a cleaner layout would have a much better
reception. Which just goes to show that at the end of the day, there’s a reason
why publishing is a whole industry with designers and compositors and other
experts involved in the printing of a book, because otherwise you get the
unholy mess that is this website. As it is, I didn’t much care for the story at
all, and am all sorts of amazed that this is the final winner of what must have
multiple entries. Whenever a bad story gets published, I always think, who was
the editor who commissioned this piece, or approved of its publication in the
first place? With this story, I am forced to wonder: how bad were the other
entries, that this is what finally
won the award?
Here’s holding out hope that the other winners present something better.