BOOKS By Jesse Davis
Land of the Pure
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Zarrar Said’s debut novel Pureland is a timely warning.
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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
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ometimes the story of the prophecy, for starters, though this a book’s publication time delivered by a levitating saint. can be as exciting as Narrated by the assassin who kills the thing itself. There Salim Agha, the protagonist based on is a story, perhaps Salam, the novel follows Agha from his apocryphal, that birth in a feudal village in the fictional the Maunsel edition of James Joyce’s nation of Pureland through politiDubliners was disposed of by guillotine. cal upheaval, unlucky love, exile, and Whether or not censors were so affrontscientific success. All the while, Agha ed as to slice the offending manuscript is motivated by love — his love for the in half, Ulysses was absolutely shredded, beautiful Laila and for Pureland, the smuggled, and seized. Similarly, Zarrar country that refuses to accept him. Said’s Pureland (Global Collective PubFor a novel completed before 2016 lishers), recently released in the U.S. and and initially published in 2018, it’s reU.K., met with opposition on its original markable how much Pureland resonates publication in 2018, by HarperCollins, today. From the Hindu supremacy movein India and Pakistan. ment in India to the resur“The book itself has gence of white supremacy Zarrar Said similarly gone through in America, the dangers what the protagonist Said warns of in Pureland goes through, a kind are as menacing as ever in of cultural shunning,” 2020. “I didn’t know that says Zarrar Said, the we would be facing these novel’s well-traveled kinds of hatred-driven author, who was born movements that we are in Pakistan, grew up in experiencing right now,” Dubai, and now makes Said says. his home in New York. “My objective is to “It’s been banned by tell the story that societmost retailers in India. ies will suffer from the It’s been taken off the prejudices they keep,” shelves in Pakistan. … Said explains. “Look at My books have been the Nazi party, who rose taken off the shelves through the ballot box in India for no reason and [went] on to destroy other than I was born the very institutions that across the border.” put it in power. Said, a quantitative “You cannot be culmathematician who has turally monogamous,” written for science pubSaid continues. Such a lications, was inspired to uniformity of culture write his first novel when punishes the persecutors he came across the story along with the persecutof Pakistan’s only Nobel ed. It costs Pureland the Prize-winning physicist, genius of Salim Agha — Abdus Salam, who was just as surely as it denies also the first Muslim to Agha the sanctuary of win the Nobel Prize in Physics. “Salam his beloved homeland. was a very enigmatic character,” Said But for all the time spent in the ficsays, explaining why his proposed tional Pureland, Said’s debut is also set nonfiction biography of Salam became in its protagonist’s adopted land of the a work of fiction. Salam’s life, Said says, United States, in New York. “At the end was prophesied by a saint — and that’s of the day, this is an American novel,” just the beginning. “He was born in a Said says. “We come from everywhere small town that didn’t have electricity. in this country, and we bring with us He actually never saw a lightbulb until the luggage of our past.” the age of 15, but he went on to revoluThat thought makes some of the tionize the way we look at energy. narrator’s parting words all the more “He faced extreme racism,” Said foreboding. “The people here, too, have continues. “But the irony is he loved his begun to accentuate the elements that country so much, so I turned it into a love make us different from one another,” story. It was just too magical otherwise.” Pureland’s narrator warns. “There’s a And Pureland is magical — it has destructive branding underway.”
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