‘Snuffing Out the Moon’ anxious to do too much: speakers say
Book evinces an acute knowledge of everything that goes into fictional themes
PHOTO COURTESY: FIRSTPOST
LAHORE:
Though it is a large and imaginative work of prose, “Snuffing Out the Moon” somehow falls short of being recognised as a novel.
The book evinces an acute knowledge of everything that goes into fictional characters, plots, settings, themes, but it does not even begin to be a novel.
However, that does not mean it is a bad piece of work. It is more akin to a blueprint for a work, done up ever so lavishly, which remains a completely separate entity from the work itself. These views were expressed by participants of an event that was organised at Lahore College for Women University (LCWU) to review the book on Tuesday. Dr Osama Siddique, the author of the book, is a legal scholar and policy reform adviser. He is an associate fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), Lahore. Throwing light on the book, the author said there were six separate storylines ranging from 2084 BCE to 2084 CE, that play out over a common geography — the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. However, nothing knits these stories together into the one purported novel.
Every storyline is continually interrupted by another, with a structure that goes forward in time and then backward and finally back the future. As a result, it is serving no narrative purpose, except to assure us (with literary knowingness) that one is reading a single work.
The speakers said ultimately, “Snuffing Out the Moon” suffers from an anxiety to do too much, a fairly typical issue with first novels. One has the feeling that the author, eager to ‘prove himself’, did not want to leave out any promising storyline that had occurred to him.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 27th, 2017.
Though it is a large and imaginative work of prose, “Snuffing Out the Moon” somehow falls short of being recognised as a novel.
The book evinces an acute knowledge of everything that goes into fictional characters, plots, settings, themes, but it does not even begin to be a novel.
However, that does not mean it is a bad piece of work. It is more akin to a blueprint for a work, done up ever so lavishly, which remains a completely separate entity from the work itself. These views were expressed by participants of an event that was organised at Lahore College for Women University (LCWU) to review the book on Tuesday. Dr Osama Siddique, the author of the book, is a legal scholar and policy reform adviser. He is an associate fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), Lahore. Throwing light on the book, the author said there were six separate storylines ranging from 2084 BCE to 2084 CE, that play out over a common geography — the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. However, nothing knits these stories together into the one purported novel.
Every storyline is continually interrupted by another, with a structure that goes forward in time and then backward and finally back the future. As a result, it is serving no narrative purpose, except to assure us (with literary knowingness) that one is reading a single work.
The speakers said ultimately, “Snuffing Out the Moon” suffers from an anxiety to do too much, a fairly typical issue with first novels. One has the feeling that the author, eager to ‘prove himself’, did not want to leave out any promising storyline that had occurred to him.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 27th, 2017.