A timeless tradition of cunning and corruption

Like his debut novel, Daniyal Mueenuddin's new book continues to chart the moral decline of Pakistan's gentry

- Somak Ghoshal

Mueenuddin sets his stories in a farm in western Pakistan.

(ISTOCKPHOTO)

In an interview to The New Yorker last year, Daniyal Mueenuddin described his story, The Golden Boy, as a piece that is "embedded in a much larger history".

"Like a peripheral scene in some enormous battle painting—think of Goya or Breughel," the Pakistani-American writer put it. "All our stories—the stories of our lives—are so important to us, and yet we live in a corner of the painting, a corner of the tapestry."

In his new book, This is Where the Serpent Lives, published nearly two decades after his luminous debut In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009), Mueenuddin revives the metaphor, indulging in the delicate art of teasing out the stories that lie on the fringes, usually hidden in plain sight.

Like Shakespeare's minor characters, the men and women in Mueenuddin's tales contain multitudes, secreted from the public eye, sometimes even from themselves, surprising the reader at every turn.

This is Where the Serpent Lives is made of three long stories and one novella, loosely interconnected by overlapping characters. Mueenuddin had followed a similar structure in his previous book, where the technique had felt fresh and original. Somewhat disappointingly, the new collection feels overpowered by themes he has already explored, with his unique sense of humour, in intimate detail. It is tough, if not impossible, to replicate the impact of a contemporary classic like Nawabdin Electrician (2009), though