Judging a book by its cover

There are very few downsides to reading books like Anna Karenina, The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one of them is that whatever novel you read following one of them has an unusually high chance of disappointing. And disappointment is exactly what I was left with after reading the last page of Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam.

I found it at a recent used book sale and there were two reasons I bought it: I liked the cover, and I liked the title. After enduring all 369 pages, I still really like the cover, and I still really like the title.

I think the story itself is compelling. Focused on one family, the book is a tour of day-to-day life among a community of immigrants from Pakistan living in the U.K., in a city that was not immediately recognizable to me. It seems to me there were two, possibly three, main plot lines. The first is the search for the killers of the husband’s brother and his live-in girlfriend. The second is the husband’s affair with a woman who, it turns out, needs to accomplish some very specific things according to the almighty Allah: Since her alcoholic husband beat the shit out of her and then uttered the word “divorce” three times in a row, her mandate, as understood by the faithful, is to marry another man and then divorce him. Once that’s accomplished, she has the blessing of Allah to return to her abusive, alcoholic husband and remarry him. Don’t feel bad if you need to reread that to make sure you’ve got the order of it correctly. I sure did.

The biggest disappointment was the third plot line (and I hesitate to call it that because I’m not sure it qualifies), which focuses on the family’s wife and mother, Kaukab. The most devout of the characters, she’s at war on one level or another with all three of her children, with her husband, with the neighbors and with England, in a way that’s both specific and general.

What fell apart for me was that Kaukab’s concerns, like the concerns of nearly every character, are written in a way that is so trite I think I rolled my eyes through most of it. With the exception of the few paragraphs dedicated to Kaukab’s struggle with the language and the disparity between what she says and what she feels, which I thought were excellent, Nadeem Aslam paints her in the same way he paints the rest. He trots out one cliché after another, and they’re clichés conveyed with writing that rarely rises above the level of an earnest amateur.

Of course, in fairness, I do wonder how the book would have struck me had I read it at a different time. Because after a few weeks in Macondo with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the driver’s seat, most writing is bound to fall flat, including mine.