BOOK REVIEW: THE BLACK MARKETER'S DAUGHTER BY SUMAN MALLICK

 

Synopsis:

Zuleikha arrives in the US from Lahore, Pakistan, by marriage, having trained as a pianist without ever owning a real piano. Now she finally has one--a wedding present from her husband--but nevertheless finds it difficult to get used to her new role of a suburban middle-class housewife who has an abundance of time to play it. Haunted by the imaginary worlds of the confiscated contraband books and movies that her father trafficked in to pay for her education and her dowry, and unable to reconcile them with the expectations of the real world of her present, she ends up as the central figure in a scandal that catapults her into the public eye and plays out in equal measures in the local news and in backroom deliberations, all fueled by winds of anti-Muslim hysteria.

The Black-Marketer's Daughter was a finalist for the Disquiet Open Borders Book Prize, and praised by the jury as a "complicated and compelling story" of our times, with two key cornerstones of the novel being the unsympathetic voice with which Mallick, almost objectively, relays catastrophic and deeply emotional events, and the unsparing eye with which he illuminates the different angles and conflicting interests at work in a complex situation. The cumulative effects, while deliberately unsettling to readers, nevertheless keeps them glued to the pages out of sheer curiosity about what will happen next. 

My Thoughts 

The Black-Marketer's Daughter

Honestly when I requested this book from Netgalley, I was drawn to the name and did not really read what it was about. 

But am I happy that I picked this up. This story is short but so very gripping that you will not be able to put it down. 

The story follows Zuleikha a young woman of Pakistani origin and who is also Muslim trying to get used to married life which has been more challenging for her than she expected.

While Zu's husband Iskander is a relatively good person he is almost too perfect, that she becomes bored.. With this boredom, Zu falls into the arms of another man, and this leads to damage of epic proportions. What really resonated with me were the issues that were highlighted i.e, gender, religion, culture and even politics. 

I love when a work of fiction can get such powerful messages across to the masses because reading in itself is supposed to expand individual thoughts beyond what is considered the norm. This book did that for me, The only thing is that the ending was a bit abrupt. I felt that more could have been said as to Iskander's fate. But in all tnis was a well written book that I can recommend.