Kartography [Hardcover]

Kamila Shamsie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2003

Crib mates, raised together from birth, narrator Raheen and her best friend Karim dream each other's dreams, finish each other's sentences, speak in a language of anagrams. They share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi with parents who are also best friends, even once engaged to the other until they rematched in what they jokingly call "the fiancee swap." The night Karim's family migrates from Karachi to London, Raheen knows that "some of my tears were his tears and some of his tears were mine." But as distance and adolescence split them apart, Karim takes refuge in the rationality of maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind her parents' exchange. What she uncovers takes us back two decades to reveal a story not just of a family's turbulent history but that of a country--and brings us forward to a grown-up Raheen and Karim drawn back to each other in the city that is their true home.

(20030801)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Kartography is Kamila Shamsie's impressive third novel. At its heart is a traditional love story-cum-family saga. Karim and Raheen are anagram-swapping "fated friends." Until the age of 13, when Karim moved to London, they were virtually raised as brother and sister. Their parents had once been engaged to each other. The unravelling of quite why this matrimonial square dance occurred is juxtaposed with Karim and Raheen's own, and decidedly more protracted, romance.

As the title suggests, mapping--geographical, political and emotional--is central to the book. The "comic" spelling is a wry allusion to its setting: the troubled Pakistani city of Karachi, a place that, as Karim observes, worships "at the altar of K." Karim, Raheen and their friends Sonia and Zia all belong to the privileged Karachi elite. Born on the right "side of the Clifton Bridge" they seem immune from Karachi's endemic corruption, violence, and religious and ethnic intolerance but they and their families, like the rest of the city's inhabitants, have all been horrifically scarred by events of the 1971 civil war.

Like Austen, or perhaps more accurately Forster, Shamsie is wonderfully adept at capturing the petty rivalries and social games of Pakistan's highly stratified bourgeoisie society--Zia's house is sagely described as "always full of people worth cultivating, rather than people worth having in your home." There are a few (well-acknowledged) nods to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and even Homer's Odyssey gets a look in but Shamsie wears her learning lightly. She manages to make Karim and Raheen's journey to toward engagement, both with the realities of Karachi and with each other, into a profound meditation on the nature of love, storytelling and politics. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

The trauma of war is typically gauged by loss of lives and property, not broken hearts, but the microcosm is often as powerful an indicator of loss as the macrocosm-or so Shamsie seems to say in her latest novel, a shimmering, quick-witted lament and love story. Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, is a place under constant siege: ethnic, factional, sectarian and simply random acts of violence are the order of the day. This violence-and the lingering legacy of the civil war of 1971-is the backdrop for the story of Raheen and Karim, a girl and boy raised together in the 1970s and '80s, whose lives are shattered when a family secret is revealed. The two friends and their families are members of the city's wealthy elite, personified in its shallowness by family members like Raheen's supercilious Aunt Runty and in guilty social conscience by Karim himself. This is a complex novel, deftly executed and rich in emotional coloratura and wordplay (the title is inspired by Karim's burgeoning obsession with mapmaking, and spelled with a "k" after the city's name). Shamsie pays homage to Calvino with a pastiche of Invisible Cities written by Raheen at her upstate New York college. But Shamsie's novel deals more with ghosts than cities: ghosts of relationships, ghosts of childhood, ghosts of love. A ghost is said to haunt a tree where Raheen's father-once engaged to Karim's mother-carved their initials long ago. Two ghosts representing Karim and Raheen walk an invisible city in Raheen's Calvino tribute. As someone said to Raheen: "There's a ghost of a dream you don't even try to shake free of because you're too in love with the way she haunts you." In similar fashion, Raheen remains in love with Karachi, family and friends, even as one by one their facades crumble.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151010102
• ISBN-13: 978-0151010103
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,323,787 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mapping the boundaries of the human heart., July 26, 2003

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Kartography (Hardcover)

In this warm and complex study of friendship, love, and roots, Kamila Shamsie focuses on the interrelationships of a group of vividly realized, upper-class residents of Karachi, particularly Raheen and Karim and their friends, only thirteen years old as the novel opens. Raheen has always regarded Karim, her one-time crib-companion and blood-brother, as her best friend, someone who knows her so well he can complete her sentences. Their parents, too, are close friends, and as the story evolves, we learn that Raheen's father was once engaged to marry Karim's mother, and that Raheen's mother once pledged to marry Karim's father.

The story behind the exchange of fiancées, though revealed as an intimate personal story, has wider implications, since it is tied, obliquely, to the ethnic unrest of 1971, when civil war broke out between East and West Pakistan, and Bangladesh came into being. Unaware of the conflicts which occurred before they were born, the children are also unaware of the reasons for the fiancée-switch. It is only after they have grown up, attended college, and gained new perspectives that this mysterious situation begins to haunt them, influencing both their relationships with their parents and their unique and special relationship with each other.

Acutely sensitive to language and story, Raheen, now 23, is writing about her damaged relationship with Karim in an attempt to understand it. Straightforward and perceptive in her thinking and speech, she conjures up imagined conversations from the past with a deft, often humorous touch. Precocious, articulate, and somewhat rebellious as a child, she is, as an adult, somewhat detached and even blase about emotional issues, including the continuing violence in Karachi. Karim, on the other hand, demands accountability. He is a map-maker, accustomed to evaluating and correcting what he sees. Ultimately, the two must map the past in new ways, filling in the uncharted territories of their lives, and creating new boundaries and borders.

The emotional resonance of this novel is enhanced by strong subordinate characters. The parents of Raheen and Karim are insightfully drawn, and their story, as it unwinds, shows the fragility of relationships and the insidious prejudices that can creep into people's lives. As the exchange of fiancées is revealed through the eyes of the participants, the reader observes parallel events in the lives of Raheen, Karim, and their friends. Major themes are illuminated in the small details of everyday life, rather than in great historical moments. Through unique observations and insights into human character, this rich, thought-provoking novel creates maps of the human heart, ultimately achieving a universality and depth one does not often find in novels of personal relationships. Warm and human, this is a novel to love. Mary Whipple

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Honest and heartachingly true, January 14, 2005

By 

Tracy Middlebrook (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kartography (Hardcover)

Goodness, I was SO emotionally invested in this book. It is narrated by a person whom I love so much...she is such a wonderfully TRUE character and I so ABSOLUTELY identify with her. Plus, the narrative style is so personable and delightful...it's a gorgeous story. The images of maps (duh! It's called Kartography...which I'm guessing is a combination of cartography and the fact that it is set in Karachi) and the way that residents of Karachi relate to space and place names...it's just BRILLIANT. These were some of the most accurately depicted 13 year olds I'd ever read, and their early twentysomething selves are equally true and satisfying. It was a bit amazing to me how much I could relate to them when I was fortunate enough to never have lived through all the civil war, violence and uprisings of Pakistan in the seventies, eighties and nineties, but that's part of what I love so much about this book...everyone is still human and has everyday mundane human moments, even when one's city is at war. Just, wow. This was the PERFECT book that came into my life at the perfect time. I read the entire thing in one day...almost. I read 10 pages the first night, half of it at work, and then I stayed up well past 1am finishing it (and weeping like a baby too. What an emotional ride, but I cherished it!!)

This novel is beautiful and very honest. God, I really identified with the narrator. You see friendships blossom and die and drift apart and change...it totally made me want to call all of my friends (especially those to whom I was close but haven't seen in awhile) but seeing how late it was when i finished reading, I refrained. *smile*

Normally, when I've read an AMAZING book I run around making everyone read it (Josephine Tey's "Daughter of Time" is a recent example) but while I needed to tell people about this one, I didn't want anyone else to read it just yet. Because if someone else were to read it and not love it, I thought it would break my heart. I've had a little more time to breathe now and am willing to loan my copy to friends now.

Plus, I knew little specifics on all the problems in Pakistan so this book was really informative, too.

Definitely made me wish I were better at anagrams!!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, Witty and Astute: But tread slowly, May 8, 2004

By 

Bushra (London, U.K.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kartography (Hardcover)

Kamila Shamsie's third novel, "Kartography" is an engaging, witty, yet strangely endearing story.
Raheen and Karim, members of Karachis elite privileged class, are soul mates from birth, but after Karims move abroad they somehow drift apart, yet hold onto memories forever. On his return, Raheen seeks to understand what possibly could have caused the divide between their hearts; Karim seems accusatory, speaks in a language she cannot understand, and is trying to tell her something that she does not know of. In between their complicated love and friendship, there are haunts of an earlier relationshop; Karims and Raheens parents were once engaged to each other, until "the music changed". Why this happened, and how it affected their childrens lives, Raheen asks and explores, until she is told the truth and her world and literally everything she stood for, collapses.

In the larger political and social backdrop is the Civil war between East and West Pakistan that divided the nation into two. This story, set in the later 80's and early 90s sees Karachi, their beloved city, torn apart by strife and violence. Should this affect their relationship? Raheen chooses to accept it while Karim feels the pain and demands Raheen to understand it in context.

Kamila Shamsie's writing is extremely engaging and humorous, with a shrewd understanding of society and people, at times; although she can be confusing and rewuire readers to read over to fully understand the meaning. Conversations don't always seem real; the characters speak in drawn out sentences and in a literary, philosophical manner, which can be annoying at times (nobody speaks in words like "palimpsest"). The book refers only to a very very minute selection of Karachi society, the extreme elite who live outside the circles that define mainstream Karachi.
However, despite the confusion and constant energy and action that can be taxing to your understanding of the plot and following of the story, Kartography is extremely enjoyable, overall very well written and astute. While not particularly deep, as novels go, its definitely worth its price.