How is it that I managed to retain absolutely nothing about this tale?
“But for Maryam, university was just an interruption before she could take over the family business. The only future that mattered to her was the one that would unfold in Karachi, a city to which Zahra had no intention of returning once she’d left it.”
That the story is about friendship, and in particular about female friendship, should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading Shamsie’s works as of late. Read enough of her novels and you’ll realize this is something that’s particularly close to her heart: the concept of platonic relationships and how they affect our decisions and our life paths, analyzed in a manner that very few other Pakistani authors do.
Her last few novels have featured a lot of female friendships, either through her own realization about how important they are as she became older, or due to a burgeoning awakening led by social media conversations around the importance of female ties. Whatever it may be, I’m all for stories that focus on this particular dynamic, except of course for the fact that the careful dissection in this particular work of Shamsie left me completely unmoved and with no recollection of it whatsoever.
“By contrast, whatever happened to Maryam today wouldn’t matter very much. She’d still inherit a business and a place in society. The rich lived in a different universe.”
That the girls come from different backgrounds was something I recalled once I read the blurb, in a manner very reminiscent of the sort of class analysis Shamsie loves to explore in her novels. This idea of humans acting in a certain manner because of their wealth and privilege is also something that comes up very regularly in Shamsie’s works, although it mostly stays in the background — or maybe it was discussed in more detail in this one? Who knows?
“By contrast, whatever happened to Maryam today wouldn’t matter very much. She’d still inherit a business and a place in society. The rich lived in a different universe.”
That the girls come from different backgrounds was something I recalled once I read the blurb, in a manner very reminiscent of the sort of class analysis Shamsie loves to explore in her novels. This idea of humans acting in a certain manner because of their wealth and privilege is also something that comes up very regularly in Shamsie’s works, although it mostly stays in the background — or maybe it was discussed in more detail in this one? Who knows?
Certainly not me.
“Perhaps friendship was not only about what you said to each other, but also about what you didn't.”
I think the one thing I did notice, and which the book ironically is named after, was the friendship, which never really created any emotion in me. This was funny because it does seem like the whole basis of the plot was the fact that these girls were oh-so-very-close to each other. But throughout the book I remember feeling like I never really felt any of that closeness that the book lays claim to, and while I admire the idea of what Shamsie tried to do, I do believe I’ve read better depictions of female friendship in a hundred other iterations.
“Perhaps friendship was not only about what you said to each other, but also about what you didn't.”
I think the one thing I did notice, and which the book ironically is named after, was the friendship, which never really created any emotion in me. This was funny because it does seem like the whole basis of the plot was the fact that these girls were oh-so-very-close to each other. But throughout the book I remember feeling like I never really felt any of that closeness that the book lays claim to, and while I admire the idea of what Shamsie tried to do, I do believe I’ve read better depictions of female friendship in a hundred other iterations.
So while it’s not a crime to not be able to depict relationships in a way that other people recognize (all personal ties are subjective to our lived experiences, so on and so forth), it does matter whether the reader believes in the relationship you are basing your entire premise on, and this reader, very sadly, didn’t.
“You don’t mind the exclusivity, you just mind that you aren’t part of it, Layla had said once, as if this was a Maryam-specific attitude rather than absolutely everyone’s objection to exclusivity.”
The book also had the usual Shamsie tropes of Muslim characters in name only with their barely-there religious inclinations, rich characters with their unbelievable levels of privilege being flaunted, and all the various possible combinations of desi-related triteness that can be found in any Pakistani novel, such as class divisions and cricket and heat. I think the problem with reading novels from a country with such limited literary output is that on the one hand, everything is a cliche, but on the other hand, it is very hot! We are obsessed with cricket! Our class issues are systemic and never-ending! Which just goes to show that the problem with proper representation is that while all those things are true, in the absence of other narratives, they become the only thing that is true, and that is where the problem lies.
“Cricket told you that talent and grit and character would win out, that giants could be felled, that today’s defeat could always be followed by tomorrow’s victory. Yes, there were errors and injustices, cruelty even. But beyond that was the game itself, radiant and untainted.”
In the end I genuinely have no idea what the ending of the book was or whether I enjoyed it, because the blurb went on being unhelpful by mentioning a ‘fateful night’ that changes the course of this friendship and ‘troubling figures’ that emerge in the future decades later. What? When? Who? Trying to write this review is both a humbling and an enlightening experience, not only because it shows me how weak my memory is when it comes to certain plotlines, but also because it clarifies clearly how our experience of a book can change over time. I rated this book a lofty 3 out of 5 stars, which is a pretty high scale overall by my standards, and yet a few months down the line it’s clearly not a tale that stuck with me as something memorable, so if you enjoy something momentarily but it doesn’t really leave a mark on you, was it even good in the first place?
“She was filled with the satisfaction of being with a group of people and knowing the words and tone that would produce exactly the effect you wanted. This was what was meant by belonging and home.”
In conclusion, after having remembered barely any of it, I’m going to go with my gut instinct and say that it was still a passably decent read. With all these arguments about social media destroying our brains and the mental gymnastics I perform daily with my bilingual full-time job/tutoring sessions/household management, I’m going to give myself some grace and trust the judgement of my past self, who gave this book a good rating, not knowing future me would be struggling so. Just because something doesn’t leave an indelible mark on you doesn't mean it wasn’t worth it in the moment, and every single thing we experience doesn’t need to be life changing.
How’s that for a life lesson from a book you can’t even remember?
***
ORIGINAL REVIEW: For a story that talks about friendship, it sure gets a lot of it really wrong.