Sunday Times, Sri Lanka
‘Is this art or bullshit?’ begins Asgar Hussein’s short story collection, The Mirror of Paradise, in ‘A Tale of Two Artists’, a satire on the pretensions of the Colombo art scene. The reader may well ask the same question of Asgar’s writing – is this art or bullshit? While there are elements of both in these thirteen stories, the truth is ultimately neither.
Asgar doesn’t demand of his readers the sort of lofty, sophisticated appraisal, feigned or otherwise, that the abstract painter Shantha from the opening story does from his viewers, with his portentously titled abstract canvases (‘Finite Evolution’, ‘Angst of the soul’). Despite the book’s title, from which you might expect a grim, social-realist dirge on Sri Lankan underclass life – a ‘mirror’ to the sandy beach, swaying palm tree ‘paradise’ promised by tourist brochures (get it?) – Asgar offers up a series of comic fables that gently satirise the anxieties and absurdities of Sri Lankan, largely middle class, life.
A dull accountant frets over the noise of cricket-playing boys, which threatens the calm of his respectable neighbourhood; a man who has spent his working life in England returns to Colombo to relive his carefree schooldays, only to have his nostalgia checked by the presence of an old nemesis; two students play at being prospective husbands and assume false, worthier identities in order to fool rich Kandyan families into lavishly entertaining them for their daughters.
But they aren’t all tales of well-to-do urbanites: tucked in among them are rustic, ‘village’ pieces, where the petty worries of their city counterparts are mirrored in the superstitions of the simple country folk that populate stories like ‘Grease Yaka’, where the fishing community of Makaragoda make increasingly farcical attempts to slay a black furry demon they believe keeps groping their women.
However, set against the ‘city’ stories, these tales of simple, credulous peasants, which take the form of traditional folk tales, can’t help but look condescending. They perhaps betray the writer’s own decidedly urban upbringing in Kandy, and his view of the countryside as someplace ‘other’ – a view no doubt shared by the city-dwelling characters he mocks so expertly elsewhere. Although charming and inventive as individual stories, the ‘village’ pieces together appear as contrived attempts to balance the affluent urban scenario that marks the rest of the book – something Asgar needn’t do.
The blurb on the back cover describes the stories as ‘a satire on human nature […] linked by a comic view of human existence […] intriguing and often outrageously funny.’ Although the better comic set-pieces will make any reader smile, especially those familiar with the insularity and aspirational fervour of Sri Lankan middle class life, it is at no point ‘outrageously funny’.
Asgar is often brutal to his protagonists – who, remaining largely likeable despite their comic foibles, are alternately beaten up, cheated out of millions, wrongly imprisoned and even driven to death. But their fates read more like cautionary tales, with all the cosiness and moral certainty that this implies, than black comedies – a genre which requires a certain trampling over taboos and a consequent discomfort in the reader. Indeed this could be just the sort of cheery, inoffensive poolside reading that tourists indulge in on their two-week visits to ‘paradise’.
Assuming the classical Greek comedy formula, each of the stories’ tragic-comic heroes has a blind spot that hampers their relations with others; in the case of Bandula in ‘A Man of Strong Opinions’, an overly zealous objection to both mosquitoes and politicians, which causes him to offend and alienate others at parties. This ultimately leads them, despite obvious warnings and omens to change their ways, to whatever calamity Asgar has in store for them – and so lessons are learnt and the greater cohesion of the community is validated.
Sometimes Asgar eschews these comeuppances and ends his stories with punchline gags – often scatological, and in one case involving urine – in a last ditch attempt to be ‘outrageously funny’. If they were bolder and wittier, the reader might excuse the shamelessly contrived and arbitrary manner in which these gags are brought about, and their failure to properly conclude the narratives. As such they come off as botched writerly tricks.
Yet, despite the breezy tone of Asgar’s prose – itself a model of good, plain writing that makes the whole thing wonderfully readable – the dark portents of the book’s title aren’t completely unwarranted. Although his characters for the most part enjoy great material comfort – spacious bungalows with fish tanks in smart districts of Colombo predominate – the bourgeois world that Asgar portrays is one crumbling under the heaped-up weight of envy, suspicion and avarice, and whose barricades against the uncertainty and chaos of the ‘real’ Sri Lanka prove thin. A wedding between a Sri Lankan Muslim man and a Dutch ‘Burgher’ woman is ruined due to their respective families’ fussy insistence on differing notions of ‘correct’ wedding conduct, and a drinking session among male friends descends from an exchange of work-related woes into insults and violence.
This is the true achievement of The Mirror of Paradise. What it lacks in belly laughs and black comic shudders, it makes up with a well-observed, subtle, yet fond parody of a society that fails to live up to its own prudish morals – and which constantly needs saving from itself.
‘Is this art or bullshit?’ begins Asgar Hussein’s short story collection, The Mirror of Paradise, in ‘A Tale of Two Artists’, a satire on the pretensions of the Colombo art scene. The reader may well ask the same question of Asgar’s writing – is this art or bullshit? While there are elements of both in these thirteen stories, the truth is ultimately neither.
Asgar doesn’t demand of his readers the sort of lofty, sophisticated appraisal, feigned or otherwise, that the abstract painter Shantha from the opening story does from his viewers, with his portentously titled abstract canvases (‘Finite Evolution’, ‘Angst of the soul’). Despite the book’s title, from which you might expect a grim, social-realist dirge on Sri Lankan underclass life – a ‘mirror’ to the sandy beach, swaying palm tree ‘paradise’ promised by tourist brochures (get it?) – Asgar offers up a series of comic fables that gently satirise the anxieties and absurdities of Sri Lankan, largely middle class, life.
A dull accountant frets over the noise of cricket-playing boys, which threatens the calm of his respectable neighbourhood; a man who has spent his working life in England returns to Colombo to relive his carefree schooldays, only to have his nostalgia checked by the presence of an old nemesis; two students play at being prospective husbands and assume false, worthier identities in order to fool rich Kandyan families into lavishly entertaining them for their daughters.
But they aren’t all tales of well-to-do urbanites: tucked in among them are rustic, ‘village’ pieces, where the petty worries of their city counterparts are mirrored in the superstitions of the simple country folk that populate stories like ‘Grease Yaka’, where the fishing community of Makaragoda make increasingly farcical attempts to slay a black furry demon they believe keeps groping their women.
However, set against the ‘city’ stories, these tales of simple, credulous peasants, which take the form of traditional folk tales, can’t help but look condescending. They perhaps betray the writer’s own decidedly urban upbringing in Kandy, and his view of the countryside as someplace ‘other’ – a view no doubt shared by the city-dwelling characters he mocks so expertly elsewhere. Although charming and inventive as individual stories, the ‘village’ pieces together appear as contrived attempts to balance the affluent urban scenario that marks the rest of the book – something Asgar needn’t do.
The blurb on the back cover describes the stories as ‘a satire on human nature […] linked by a comic view of human existence […] intriguing and often outrageously funny.’ Although the better comic set-pieces will make any reader smile, especially those familiar with the insularity and aspirational fervour of Sri Lankan middle class life, it is at no point ‘outrageously funny’.
Asgar is often brutal to his protagonists – who, remaining largely likeable despite their comic foibles, are alternately beaten up, cheated out of millions, wrongly imprisoned and even driven to death. But their fates read more like cautionary tales, with all the cosiness and moral certainty that this implies, than black comedies – a genre which requires a certain trampling over taboos and a consequent discomfort in the reader. Indeed this could be just the sort of cheery, inoffensive poolside reading that tourists indulge in on their two-week visits to ‘paradise’.
Assuming the classical Greek comedy formula, each of the stories’ tragic-comic heroes has a blind spot that hampers their relations with others; in the case of Bandula in ‘A Man of Strong Opinions’, an overly zealous objection to both mosquitoes and politicians, which causes him to offend and alienate others at parties. This ultimately leads them, despite obvious warnings and omens to change their ways, to whatever calamity Asgar has in store for them – and so lessons are learnt and the greater cohesion of the community is validated.
Sometimes Asgar eschews these comeuppances and ends his stories with punchline gags – often scatological, and in one case involving urine – in a last ditch attempt to be ‘outrageously funny’. If they were bolder and wittier, the reader might excuse the shamelessly contrived and arbitrary manner in which these gags are brought about, and their failure to properly conclude the narratives. As such they come off as botched writerly tricks.
Yet, despite the breezy tone of Asgar’s prose – itself a model of good, plain writing that makes the whole thing wonderfully readable – the dark portents of the book’s title aren’t completely unwarranted. Although his characters for the most part enjoy great material comfort – spacious bungalows with fish tanks in smart districts of Colombo predominate – the bourgeois world that Asgar portrays is one crumbling under the heaped-up weight of envy, suspicion and avarice, and whose barricades against the uncertainty and chaos of the ‘real’ Sri Lanka prove thin. A wedding between a Sri Lankan Muslim man and a Dutch ‘Burgher’ woman is ruined due to their respective families’ fussy insistence on differing notions of ‘correct’ wedding conduct, and a drinking session among male friends descends from an exchange of work-related woes into insults and violence.
This is the true achievement of The Mirror of Paradise. What it lacks in belly laughs and black comic shudders, it makes up with a well-observed, subtle, yet fond parody of a society that fails to live up to its own prudish morals – and which constantly needs saving from itself.
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