The Wish Maker [Hardcover]

Ali Sethi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 11, 2009

A major new international voice debuts with a sweeping story of love, friendship, and family ties that brings to life the turbulent world of modern Pakistan.

The unforgettable story of a fatherless boy growing up in a household of outspoken women, The Wish Maker is also a tale of sacrifice, betrayal, and indestructible friendship. Zaki Shirazi and his female cousin Samar Api were raised to consider themselves "part of the same litter." Together they watched American television and memorized dialogue from Bollywood movies, attended dangerous protests, and formed secret friendships. In a household run by Zaki's crusading political journalist mother and iron-willed grandmother, it was impossible to imagine a future that could hold anything different for either of them.

But adolescence approaches and the cousins' fates diverge. Samar's unconventional behavior-in which Zaki has played the role of devoted helper-brings severe consequences for her, while Zaki is sent out to discover the world for himself. It is only after years of separation from Samar that he is forced to confront the true nature of happiness, selfhood, and commitment to those he loves most.

Chronicling world-changing events that have never been so intimately observed in fiction and brimming with unmistakable warmth and humor, The Wish Maker is the powerful account of a family and an era, a story that shows how, even in the most rapidly shifting circumstances, there are bonds that survive the tugs of convention, time, and history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The Wish Maker is a coming-of-age story set in 1990s Pakistan, a story about two children and the family they grow up in, the people and the places they come to know and love. It's a story about Lahore, the city, seen gradually through the decades; a story about Benazir Bhutto and the heady promise of democracy, and the recurring nightmare of military intervention; a story about Bollywood movie stars and American TV shows and the different kinds of forbidden love they inspire. But the novel is also intended to be a meditation on the individual consciousness, a journey into the soul's capacity to know other souls, to recognize itself in others and to grant others the validity it grants itself, which is the validity of desire, of wanting more and better things all the time. This, the capacity for wish-making, for ascribing insatiability and incompletion to other people's ideas of themselves is the central concern of the book." --Ali Sethi

A Conversation with Ali Sethi

Who are Zaki and Samar Api, and why is their relationship central to your novel?

They're two middle-class kids--cousins and almost siblings, but not quite--growing up around the same time, in the same place. But as they grow older their lives take them in different directions. That divergence between the story of a boy and the story of a girl who have different but similar journeys is at the heart of the book.

Although your novel covers a span of three generations, from Pakistani independence to 2003, it focuses mainly on the 1990s. What was happening socially and politically in Pakistan during those years?
 
Different things were happening in different parts of Pakistan. In Lahore it was a relatively peaceful time. It was also an exciting time: military rule had ended after eleven years and democracy had returned, and people were feeling optimistic. There were billboards in the city; multinational companies were advertising new and foreign-looking products; the dish antenna had brought strange new worlds into the lives of people like Samar and Zaki. It was also the decade in which we declared our nuclear capability, and the decade in which fundamentalist seminaries (often set up with foreign funding) spread across the poorer parts of the country. These other changes are reflected in the lives of some of the other characters in the book. So it was a time of social and political change. And it did different things to different people.

Aside from your narrator, Zaki, women are the most important characters in your book--especially Zaki’s mother, grandmother, and of course Samar Api. Why did you choose to write this novel primarily from the perspective of women?

I majored in South Asian Studies at college and spent some time looking at colonial and postcolonial art. I found that representations of women dominated the paintings, the songs, the novels and poems and short stories of the time. I found that women were being made to embody all that was either good or bad about society. And then I saw that it was true of today as well: from the ethics of parenting and weight-loss to the Afghan woman with the green eyes on the cover of National Geographic magazine, women were being made to represent our most pressing concerns about the world. I wanted to write a story in which the perspective of a woman, certainly for a boy growing up in a male-dominated society, was revealed as an act of the imagination. And the act of imagining had to end in the granting of greater freedom, greater unknowability, to the woman subject.

Conversely, adult male characters are largely absent. Was this absence of strong men a conscious decision, or was it simply dictated by the demands of your story?

It was a conscious decision. The epigraph, which is from Middlemarch, is about the "difficult task of knowing another soul." I wanted to have a narrator who couldn't take his identity for granted, who had to learn to invent his missing father, and then learn to invent (in order to understand and finally accept) the women around him.

The women in your story live within a wide range of circumstances, from independent professionals to women still living in feudal conditions, who are under the complete control of their male relatives. How is the state of women in Pakistan changing today?

The status of Pakistani women as citizens was damaged greatly in the early eighties, when a set of discriminatory laws was introduced as part of the so-called "Islamization" process. The civilian governments of the nineties were largely unable (some say unwilling) to undo those laws. That discriminatory tone entered the textbooks (which Zaki reads in high school) and was heard on the radio and on TV. And it went unchallenged for more than a decade. But in the last few years there have been some positive developments. These include legal breakthroughs and greater visibility for women on the newly independent electronic media. In rural Pakistan, however, where most Pakistani women continue to live, the customs are older than the laws and are taking much longer to change.

After college in the United States, you moved back to Pakistan and are living once again in Lahore, your hometown. How do you see it differently after living abroad for several years?

I do see Lahore differently now: living away has made me appreciate the wonderful things about my city--the landscape, the sense of history, the cultural heritage of the city and the enduring sense of it as the cultural capital of Pakistan. And it has made me impatient with all that I think can change for the better--the room for improvement in education; old, crumbling institutions that need to be revived, especially literary institutions that need fresh input; and the prevailing security concerns that get in the way of everything.

Americans have a greater interest in Pakistan today than ever before because of its central role in the war against terrorism. Who is gaining the upper hand there--the people who are sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or those who are more oriented toward the West?

I think by and large people in Pakistan are not oriented toward the West. But that doesn't mean they are oriented toward the Taliban instead. People may use Western technology and prefer to obtain Western degrees whenever they can, and they may even watch American TV and listen to American songs, but the social infrastructure of Pakistan is still the one that was set up by the military (with Saudi and American funding) in the 1980s, encouraging a socially conservative Muslim identity. We have more outlets now for expression (more radio and TV channels, for example) but the beliefs people have are still the ones they were given all those years ago.

What is the biggest misconception that Americans have about Pakistan?

That it's a Middle Eastern country.

What would you most like Americans to know about Pakistan?

It's a country of 170 million people, as geographically diverse as your own, with mountains and deserts and lush valleys and mighty rivers. Its oldest monuments are as old as human history.

From Publishers Weekly

The turbulence of contemporary Pakistani politics is refracted through the intimate prism of a fractious extended family in this mature debut, written when the author was 23. Twenty-year-old Zaki Shirazi, his military father dead before he was born, is raised with his rebellious female cousin Samar Api in a Lahore household dominated by his liberal mother, Zakia, editor of a crusading women's magazine, and his strong-willed, culturally conservative grandmother, Daadi. The nimble two-track narrative shifts between post-9/11, when Zaki returns from college in Massachusetts for Samar's wedding, and his childhood in the early 1990s, around the time then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was deposed, an act that polarized the country. The political background frames Sethi's complex narrative, but the primary focus is on the family's relatively privileged—and often as argumentative as it is loving—household, providing Western readers with an insider's atmospheric take on a culture and a country much in the news these days. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition edition (June 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594488754
• ISBN-13: 978-1594488757
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #888,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written book, along with a little history of Pakistan, April 30, 2009

By 

A. Darling "darlingswe" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wish Maker (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

At first I was hesitated to choose this book as I was kind of over the "Kite Runner" et al, but I am glad I decided to pick The Wish Maker.

I loved this book, whipped right through it, as it was so enjoyable to read.

The plot begins in the present and switches back into the past. We have Zaki, a little boy as our narrator, he has been fatherless since age -2 months. The story mostly takes place in a traditional Pakistani middle to upper class home. I love the voyeurism of seeing how other cultures really are in their homes(they're basically just like us). In Zaki's home there are two forces, the Matriach, Daadi, a very traditional and stern woman and Zaki's mother, Zakia, a feminist and modern woman. There is also the pseudo-sister, Samir Api, who comes to live with Zaki's family as the daughter of his Grandmother's sister. It's a bit mysterious at first as to why Samir comes to live there but eventually the stories unravel. Samir Api is a charming girl who dreams of a Bollywood Actor sweeping her away someday. Zaki's adoration of Samir is evident yet subtle.

We end up asking ourselves,which is a better way to nurture children, old school or modern? the answer is probably in the perfect mix of a multi-generational household.

I love a fictional book that I can learn something from and I did learn a lot of fringe information about the era of Benazir Bhutto and her father's execution, of how pinning hopes on political leaders can often be disappointing. I also learned about the almost "Civil War" like parallels of the Pakistanis and the Indians. Pakistani children of the Grandmother's generation grew up next to Indian children, Parsi children, then one day, they are all gone, and those friendship ties are severed forever. Life goes on.

About halfway through the book I thought it was about women, but it really is much more than that, Zaki is raised in a household of women, but he lives a rich life at school with boys where he watches and learns. He is fatherless but he has strong "back up" with all the women at home who look out for him in their individual ways.

I highly recommend this book, the writer is quite talented (I think this is his first book?) He doesn't hit us over the head with the internationalism, you quickly slip into the plot and relate as human to human, not culture to culture. One thing is for sure after reading the book you will know what that costume the Pakistanis wear is called, a Shalwar Kameez. It is also worn in India but here is the definition: Traditional suit consisting of three pieces: a loose fitting, drawstring pajama like pant, a long, tunic style shirt and a long, complimenting or matching scarf. It is generally accepted that the kameez should come below the knee to the mid-calf region. The kameez is usually fitted throughout the shoulder and bust area and loose from the hips down to the hem. Side walking vents (splits) are added to both sides.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent book- but plot plods along at times...found my mind wandering, May 15, 2009

By 

Goldengate "Goldengate" (San Francisco, where else?) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wish Maker (Hardcover)

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I've visited Pakistan several times and was interested in learning about local life. Like another reviewer, I thought this might end up being another "Kite Runner."

This book starts off well, as we are acquainted with the main characters and life in present (and then past) day Pakistan. However, as the novel progressed, I found myself losing interest. What I found instead were very thorough descriptions. I did enjoy parts of the book...found myself chuckling that the two TV stations available were referred to as "India" and "Pakistan," and also at the description of the first hair-waxing ceremony. When the roof top aerial is malfunctioning, one of the characters cries out "My India is not coming!"

This book is an easy read - you might want to check it out if you have a curiosity about life in Pakistan.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Matriarchy at work., May 5, 2009

By 

Dick Johnson (Oklahoma USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wish Maker (Hardcover)

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This is exceptionally well written for a first book. It is obvious Sethi has studied the literature of successful Pakistani authors - and has learned from them. His writing is smooth and his book is pleasing to read. For those who like family sagas and/or coming-of-age books, this is a winner.

There were some shortcomings, though. I usually enjoy the very detailed novels from Pakistani and Indian authors. This one had all the drawn out descriptions but spent too much time going nowhere. The middle of the book dragged for me. I think he should have reduced the size of this by about a hundred pages.

If this book had been written by a veteran author, I would not give it more than three stars. Since this is a first novel, and since Sethi shows so much promise, it is definitely worth four stars. I would gladly read any of his future works.