Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

32: Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie

After adoring Broken Verses and finding Burnt Shadows great, but occasionally over-ambitious, I was a little apprehensive about Salt and Saffron, which was Kamila Shamsie's second novel. It begins in a slightly breathless, rambly way -- the narrator Aliya quotes her cousin as saying "There is no digression, only added detail", and she's certainly taken that aphorism to heart -- and there's a family tree included, which should give you some idea of how complex the relationships are and how preoccupied the story is with Family -- capital F most definitely intentional. It's not just family-as-relationship that matters here, but family-as-heritage and family-as-status-provider. For Aliya's family are aristocratic, and the crucial question that plagues her throughout the novel is: can she see beyond class? Does she have it in her to transcend the prejudice instilled in her by her family background?

Shamsie is marvellous on privilege -- one of the most brilliant achievements in Burnt Shadows was the way she perfectly depicted the mindset of a white Englishman in India in the 1940s; how he could be, in his own way, decent and kind, and yet be so blinkered by his upbringing and position as simply not to see why the Indians he employed might resent his presence. The exploration of Aliya's own prejudices, and her reluctance to admit to them, and the way her relatives, in various different ways, bolster them up and reaffirm them, is tremendously clever and rings true. As with her other novels, she creates a startlingly vivid sense of place (from reading Kamila Shamsie novels I almost feel I'd know Karachi if I ever visited there), and a palpable warmth in the relationships between her characters. I'm always particularly struck by how beautifully she depicts platonic or familial relationships between women; I can see the seeds of the mother/daughter bond that was central to Broken Verses here, in Aliya's relationships with her grandmother and her absent cousin.

I have some caveats. Salt and Saffron is sometimes a bit too overstuffed with detail. Aliya spends a lot of the novel retelling family stories, some of which go back hundreds of years and involve convoluted lines of ancestry; I did have to consult the family tree a number of times just to keep track, and a couple of times I got bogged down and was faintly annoyed at being given all this apparently extraneous information. But at the same time, the family stories are told with a great deal of gusto, wit, and exuberance, and Shamsie knows when to slow down and be more sparing with detail, during the scenes when we're in the present day and Aliya finds that her storytelling is not adequate to make sense of her current situation. I would also note that I found the ending a little bit pat -- it wasn't unconvincing, exactly, just overly neat. But all of these are minor complaints about a novel that I really loved. It's funny and moving and clever and generally brilliant; it made me laugh and it made me cry. Wonderful stuff.

(tags: pakistani author)