![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
The richness of Shamsie’s fiction is in the ways in which varied themes and stories within a novel are multilayered, interact and are part of each other, so that the narrative about a person or a couple is viewed within a larger, more socially dense context. Her novels both show the difficulty of leaving the society in which one feels at ease and the need to solve present problems through understanding the past. Besides politics threatening or causing loss of family or friends, there is a love story disturbed by differences of class, culture or ethnicity. The novels treat the relationship of national events to the personal. The military is important because it controlled Pakistani politics since the partition of India: Burnt Shadows shows the effects of the Japanese and American military upon individuals.
Notes
1. “Tri‐Sub‐Continental” (86–91). Another version of the relevant information about homesickness and re‐creating Karachi in her novels can be found in Leaving Home 394–97.
2. Page numbers refer to the paperback Bloomsbury editions in the list of works cited.
3. Aliya calls her “Mariam Apa”. “Apa” is the appellation for “Elder Sister”, but Mariam is actually first cousin to Aliya’s father. In Pakistani terminology, she is an “aunt” to Aliya; in British or American usage she is a cousin.
4. “Acknowledgements” to Kartography; “Tri‐Sub‐Continental” 87.
5. The relationship is discussed in detail in Muneeza Shamsie, “Sunlight and Salt”, which provides an excellent discussion of Hosain’s novel and its relationship to Salt and Saffron.