Scenes from Early Life
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the Man Booker–short-listed author of The Northern Clemency, a family and a nation—Bangladesh—are forged through storytelling, conversation, jokes, feuds, blood, songs, bravery, and sacrifice
In late 1970 a boy named Saadi is born into a large, defiantly Bengali family in eastern Pakistan. Months later the country splits in two, in what will become one of the most ferocious twentieth-century civil wars. Saadi tells the story of his childhood and of the ingenious ways his family survived the violence and conflicts: from his aunts stuffing him endlessly with sweets to stop marauding soldiers from hearing him cry, to street games based on American television shows; from the basement compartment his grandfather built to hide his treasured books, pictures, and music until after the war, to the daily gossip about each and every one of the relatives, servants, and neighbors. Scenes from Early Life is a beautifully detailed novel of profound empathy—an attempt to capture the collective memory of a family and a country.
At once heartbreaking and surprisingly funny, Scenes from Early Life is based on the life of Philip Hensher's husband, and as such it is at once a memoir, a novel, and a history. As this remarkable writer brings the past to life, we come to feel, vividly and viscerally, that Saadi's family—and its struggles and triumphs—are our own.
Scenes form Early Life is the winner of the 2013 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hensher's (King of the Badgers) lush novel, somewhat based on his husband Zaved Mahmood's Bengali childhood, the war for control of what became Bangladesh unfolds before a child's eyes. Mahmood's fictional alter ego, Saadi, is born in 1970 to an upper-middle-class family in Dacca and grows up in luxury even as the country deteriorates around him. Hensher's transitions between Saadi's present and the past of his large extended family are so seamless as to be nearly invisible. Saadi's life revolves around his maternal grandparents, figures powerful enough that Saadi, his brother and sisters, and their parents are never far from the lavish compound that is also home to a constant rotation of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Other characters flit in and out of view, most prominently musicians Altaf and Amit, who personify the deep current of artistic expression in Dacca and the bond between men that can extend beyond blood. Their forced separation, when Amit flees to Calcutta, underscores the dire situation in East Pakistan. In relaying the history of the struggle for Bangladeshi independence, Hensher avoids punctiliousness, as the story is filtered through young Saadi, whose innocence in the face of turmoil creates the emotional core of the story.
