Offering a rare glimpse of Pakistan not long after partition, this tightly plotted work remains one of Zulfikar Ghose's most well known novels.

The story involves the wealthy and powerful Shah brothers who conspire to destroy a land holder named Aziz Khan who has refused to sell his property to them. The novel works on many levels, but certainly it is the story of a culture in transition, a new way eclipsing an old way. Resplendent with striking images of Pakistan, the sociological matter is rich: modernization clashes with tradition, economic progress and industrialism obliterate time-honored values. The Shah brothers represent the new order, avaricious, devoid of scruples, shrewd manipulators of the economic process. On the other hand, Aziz Khan symbolizes the tradition, the land, and the stolid character at the heart of the old culture. Ghose writes: "And these seventy acres, this piece of earth, this world of Aziz Khan, did not appear to him as land, as a property with a market value. It was a sufficiency of existence. So that nobody could take the land away from him without first taking away his existence."

Interestingly, it is the youngest Shah brother, Afaq, whose seemingly random act of violence against a teenage peasant girl sets the story into motion. Afaq remains one of the most interesting figures in the novel. Like the bedtime story he tells in the opening chapters, he is the monkey who is always running away from disaster. Indeed, this image foreshadows Afaq's actions for the rest of the novel.

One of the truly exceptional qualities of this book is the author's style. Ghose maintains a straightforward narrative in this novel, but in some passages, the philosophical questions seem beyond the intellectual range of the characters and this situation gives the author's style some of its unique qualities. Aziz Khan's story is tragic because though he is a master of his land, he is not a master of language. Ghose writes the following:

Now a monument himself though no one had come to look; an inscription in a dead language; a hieroglyph the new literacy did not care to interpret. . . . Had his tongue been as competent as his hands. . . .

Yet beyond the specific circumstances of a land holder in the Punjab, Ghose grapples with larger issues of language and meaning. Often interweaving subtle and complex insights about the philosophical problems of language into his storytelling, Ghose frequently makes the novel's conventions, that is to say, its form, serve the needs of his style.

In The Murder of Aziz Khan one of the key themes has to do with the human consciousness and its relationship to the past, the present, and the future. Memory serves to order experience and this order is what we call Time. Yet objects have a way of defying human ordering. In this novel, objects take on a kind of menace. Like massive boulders creating rapids and whirlpools in the river of Time, places and landscapes refuse to be ordered and in fact, distort, divide, and disrupt our perception of the flow of things giving the novel a resonance and depth that is not often found in Fiction.

I read this book some years ago and remember being overwhelmed with its brilliance. I remember thinking, "Who is this guy, how come I've never read him before, how come the whole world is not talking about this book?!!" With seamlessness and yet with signboards, The Triple Mirror of the Self takes you across completely separate worlds, some magic, some too real. I felt the unfamiliar yet so intimate turgidity of Amazonian rainforests -- I could touch and smell the lusciousness and strain under the oppressiveness. I felt the familiar intimacy of Indian characters that seemed to be people I know or people I am. I stood back and watched a collage of historical footage that spanned decades, continents and worlds unfold before me. Sometimes I was the spectator, sometimes the participant. Engulfing!

Read this book. And go tell everyone.

Veronica and the Gongora Passion is a marvelous collection of stories that displays the range and the generosity of Ghose's style and his mastery of form. What makes these stories, fictions and tales so vivid and so penetrating is the mysterious and magical quality of the author's style. Ghose's sentences shimmer with poetic detail and power, and in them the perceptive reader will notice the extension of a rich literary tradition that includes Proust, Chekhov, Flaubert, Woolf, Balzac, Faulkner, Beckett and other great writers.

Contributing to the beauty of Ghose's prose is the philosophical weight of these stories. Again and again, Ghose explores the role of language and its influence over the human perception of reality. We use language in an attempt to express reality, and yet, the words, no matter how precise, no matter how beautiful--the words simply cannot convey all that we need them to. Ghose's story, "Arrival in India", whose narrator experiences a false homecoming that leaves him doubly exiled, is a good example of the power words hold over us. Ghose, through a style that often uses indirection, hints, and suggestions, shows that what we call "reality" is larger than any of the formal ways humans have of conceiving it. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," as Shakespeare would have it. And Ghose, like Shakespeare, uses language to show that much of human experience rests on, is buried under, and ends with, a terrible silence.

The settings in these 15 stories are diverse, ranging from Latin America to Pakistan to Africa's Mediterranean coast; but again, it is the style of the author's approach, the quality of the formal structure of the stories, that makes these stories truly "exotic." Ghose's fictional worlds often seem violent and strange. Many of his characters long for a worldly paradise, but end up driven by mysterious compulsions and obsessions that operate beyond the more traditional human motivations of fear and desire. Quaglino, in "A Translator's Fiction", is compelled to act out primitive rituals until he faces a dark epiphany that we, the privileged readers, discover is only a formal device designed by powers Quaglino could neither control nor understand. And later in the collection, the main character in "The Savage Mother of Desire", a man who understands his town's new policies on birth control, ends up transformed into a horrifying figure from a cultural fertility myth. In its modern and degraded state, the ancient myth compels a violent act of vengeance.

Ghose is the author of more than a dozen novels and collections of poetry and literary criticism. His literary reputation has not been served well by critics and reviewers who choose to focus on labeling writers along strictly national or ethnic boundaries. The only agenda Ghose serves is the agenda of great art. The stories in this collection, spanning several decades, are a measure of his literary integrity and they are proof that Ghose has achieved that rarest of qualities among fine writers: a unique voice in Fiction.