Uzma Aslam Khan comes to Revolution Books on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 7 pm. She will discuss her recent novel The Geometry of God. Khan also has a story in the upcoming issue of Granta Magazine issue devoted to Pakistan, and will be appearing to talk about this at LitQuake while she is in the area. Check out her blog here.
About the Geometry of God:
Amal: the practical sister who digs up the “diamond key” that unlocks the mystery of Pakicetus, a whale-dog creature who once swam the ancient seas that are now Pakistan.
Mehwish: the blind younger sister, who moves with the sun and music inside her and thinks in “cup lits not fully legal.”
Zahoor: their heretical grandfather, a scientist who loves variation and “vim zee” and his two granddaughters most of all.
Noman: the young man who steps into a lecture hall, decides “their triangle needs a fourth point,” and changes all their lives.
These are the four shifting chambers who make the heart of The Geometry of God, the new novel from lauded Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan. Through these vivid, contradictory, and original characters, Khan celebrates the complexities of familial and erotic love, the tug of curiosity and duty, the intersections of faith and longing. Her exuberant language draws from Urdu and Punjabi and invents one of its own for Mehwish, whose fractured English divides and slows and reveals.
The Geometry of God is a novel one can read greedily, following these characters as their lives unfold against the backdrop of General Zia’s Pakistan, where religious fundamentalism gains ground and the mujaheddin is funded by gem sales and the Americans. Or one can savor, as the sisters show us: digging as Amal does toward the novel’s deepest questions about love and knowledge and faith, moving as Mehwish does to the rhythms of an abundant and original language.
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Ms. Khan teaches at the University of Hawai'i, at Manoa. Says Khan, "My work has been shaped by the various countries and cultures I have lived and taught in, which include Pakistan, the United States, and Morocco." Her novels are The Story of Noble Rot (Penguin India 2001; reissued by Rupa & Co. in 2009), Trespassing(Metropolitan/Henry Holt 2004), and The Geometry of God (Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing 2009). Trespassing was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2003 and has been translated into fourteen languages in eighteen countries.The Geometry of God will appear in several languages in 2010. Her fiction has also appeared in the anthologies And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women (Feminist Press 2008) and The New Anthem: The Subcontinent In Its Own Words (Tranquebar Press 2009).
