This book takes you on a rollercoaster journey through the history, literature, culture and geography of Bengal. It leaves you haunted and mesmerized at the same time. The vivid writing of the writer brings alive the events and characters to an extent that you get attatched to them. Besides being a pleasurable read it also offers you the opportunity to gain different perspectives on the Indian history of freedom movement and the wars that followed. To sum up it is an ensnaring, enriching and emotional read. 0811218651 Wow. I have been struggling through this book for months (longer than September of 2011). What a challenge. What a read. It was very hard to understand the culture, the different nicknames people are called, all kinds of little things. If you read it, plan to start slowly, make a vocabulary list, as well as a character list, and keep track of everyone. I hope I read it again sometime, but as I have had it out of the library for 9 months, I figure someone else should stumble across it. 0811218651 I had a very hard time getting into this book. I lack a cultural/historical/religious background that would have provided a frame of reference. I constantly had to look up a map or an event or a word. Eventually I made myself just go with the story and not worry about understanding everything. Then I enjoyed it. Unfortunately I didn't really like the way it ended. The style changed, as well as the tone. 0811218651 A criminally underrated book. Should be a staple in partition literature canons. 0811218651 beautiful 0811218651
Championed by Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker, Qurratulain Hyder is one of the must reads of Indian literature. Fireflies in the Mist is Hyder's capstone to her astonishing River of Fire, which was hailed by The New York Review of Books as magisterial with a technical resourcefulness rarely seen before in Urdu fiction.
Fireflies follows the creation of modern day Bangladesh -- from Indian province, to Partition, to the emergence of statehood -- as told through the impassioned voice of Deepali Sarkar and others around her who live through the turbulence. Hyder perceptively and majestically follows the trajectory of Sarkar's life -- from her secluded upbringing in Dhaka to becoming a socialist rebel and to her ultimate transformation as a diasporic Bengali cosmopolitan -- in the way that many of yesterday's revolutionaries are slowly but surely ensnared within a net of class and luxury dangled in front of them. Fireflies in the Mist
Superb. This book is basically perfect. Hyder can seamlessly switch between nineteenth century novel of manners to 20th century existential spiral into madness to teenage adventure romance to Urdu poetry to spiritual meditation. Her mastery of these forms and the characters voices allow her to tell a story of an entire generation. How they dreamed rebellion against their parents and the creation of a new society and life for themselves, how they betrayed their own dreams, how they became the very parents they rebelled against, and how they bequeathed their children violence and ruination.
The novel is both highly personal, tracking the intertwined lives of four women, and social, providing an elegy for a South Asia that was and never came to be. South Asia’s independence movements from Britain yielded stillborn national ideas. India’s national vision of a secular society died in the slaughterhouse of partition and the state sanctioned expropriation and ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Pakistan’s vision of a socialist Islamic homeland for all South Asia’s Muslims died when West Pakistan turned Muslim refugees away at the border and again during the 1971 war when clerics twisted the Quran to support state genocide against fellow Muslims in Bengal. These disruptions and betrayals, in which the main characters and their families are complicit, shatters these four women’s lives.
Ignore the description on the back of the book: it is simplistic and designed to appeal to western readers. Also ignore the comments below (by white readers) about how the text is inaccessible. The text is written for South Asians who have family memory and other knowledge of the events taking place. The text is not an introductory course for those uninitiated to South Asian history. It does not need a glossary: engage with the text on its own terms and look up what you don’t know.
0811218651 A novel of grand historical sweep by the writer widely viewed as the greatest Urdu author of the 20'th century. Hyder translated her own book, so it doesn't read like a translation. While it deals with the transition of India from British colony to bifurcated Hindu/Muslim nation, it focuses on a group of Muslim women whose lives are intertwined in a way that makes their stories personal, so you care about the people more than the politics. Each has a different fate when India gains independence and Hindus and Muslims split. Hyder is a Muslim, and so are her main characters, but she has a marvelous empathy for Hindus and Christians, based on a kind of nostalgia for when these groups lived with one another in harmony. Fireflies In The Mist is laced with both humor and heartbreak. You laugh in one paragraph, feel devastated by what's happening in the next. Hyder is not just one of the greatest Urdu novelists. She is a great novelist period. Her work holds up with the very best of the last century. 0811218651 This was a wonderful book. Shockingly little known. I started off reading it as a bit of a joke (hindustani lit about the bengalis?) but the loving intimacy with which hyder depicts our people, with all our differences and divergences and similarities, and the way she captures the overarching sense of loss that has grasped the east bengali in the decades following partition, have truly won me over. 0811218651 I have a feeling this novel lost a lot in its translation from Urdu. It isn’t easy for Westerners to follow, with the many variations on each name, and the many classical Indian references. It could use a glossary. Yet if you stick with it to the end, you get into its rhythm and feel its power.
It follows a group of young woman and men from the days of British rule, through the Partition of India and the creation of Bangladesh. It explores the revolutionary impulse, as well as the ways revolutionaries are co-opted. And it’s a love story, although not an idealized one.
0811218651 Extremely absorbing. I found it difficult to begin, but as I became more accustomed to the Bengali Urdu as well as Hindu and Muslim vocabulary, character names, place names, and honorifics used throughout, the dramatic saga started to work its magic on me. This book in fact caused me to miss an evening at the theater (not paying attention to my stop on the U-Bahn) and to take a completely wrong train on the way back from a meeting, even though tourists asked me which train it was. I cheerfully replied, never noticing that it was their train but not mine until many stops later. So, an outrageously good book.
I'm not sure how to write about this story, this history, these examples of the tragic paths that so many Indian and, later, Pakistani lives took in the 1940s and 1950s. The fast transition from feudal society to political hothouse didn't suit the collective personality of Bengal, a humane and artistic community with (obviously) its own problems -- aside from those forced upon it as Muslims, Christians and Hindus who had lived happily and respectfully side by side for many generations suddenly found themselves enemies, refugees, and worse. Communism forms a shady yet idealistic backdrop to much of the story. The class struggles and religious/political choices of several young (and foolish) young women form the basis of the novel on one level; their innate courage, resourcefulness, and necessarily precocious maturity does so on another, mirroring the snowballing speed with which we all move helplessly through the stages of life. A great and heartrending saga of generations of good people lost along the way. 0811218651
