Zulfikar Ghose

This book presents a picture of Pakistani society in its earliest years through Aziz Khan, a representative of ancient and traditional values, and the Shah brothers, who exploit the resources and people of the new country for their personal gain. The intricate story gradually unfolds to reveal the emotions of its characters and describes the suffering of Aziz Khan with poignancy.

In 1963, Zulfikar Ghose received a special award from the E. C. Gregory Trust that was judged by T. S. Eliot, Henry Moore, Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée. A year earlier, in an issue devoted to the newly emerging Commonwealth literature, the Times Literary Supplement featured Zulfikar Ghose as the most prominent poet from the former British colonies by conspicuously printing three of his poems spread across half a page. By the time he was featured in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Ghose had been accorded major status as a writer of international repute: the editors of The Review of Contemporary Fiction noted that “Zulfikar Ghose has both ranked with and outranked several of the best English language writers in England and America,” and went on to present him as “a unique figure in contemporary literature,” whose “evolution across languages and national boundaries” was comparable to Conrad, Nabokov and Beckett. In spite of receiving such notable attention, Ghose has remained a marginal presence and, in fact, an “untouchable,” among writers accorded a world-class status. Of the several reasons suggested for Ghose’s marginalization by scholars of world literature and post-colonial studies, the most significant one is that his oeuvre resists categorisation. For Ghose, to use Proust’s phrases, “Quality of language and the beauty of an image are the heart of great writing.” Ghose’s work is full of meditative reverberations and has a fastidious style that scintillates the reader’s mind with its brilliance. His genius lies in the construction of a language that is lyrical and full of vivid imagery. He captures the images of his native Punjab as well as the South American landscape, and imbues the air with the fragrance of Amazon rainforest while his prose sends a shiver between the “shoulder blades.” In his experimentation with form, he “make[s] it new,” to use Pound’s phrase. His literary journey from the imitation of nineteenth-century realism to his most experimental and ambitious works like Hulme’s Investigations into the Bogart Script and The Triple Mirror of the Self reflects his wide range of experimentation with form and style. This book investigates the structural patterns in the novels of Zulfikar Ghose that give each of his works its peculiar aesthetic design. While on the one hand, this work notes his role as a pioneer among South Asian writers of the post-colonial era, on the other hand, his novels are examined in the critical framework erected by the writer himself with its emphasis on style: that is the central concern of this study.

From 1959 to 1973, the writers B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose regularly wrote letters to each other in which they discussed their own work and literary preoccupations. They exchanged early drafts of poems, short stories, plays and novels, and their correspondence contains detailed comments and extended analyses of these texts, as well as illuminating reflections on literature, criticism, poetics and aesthetics. Though much of the correspondence is an extended literary discussion, it also contains moments of personal revelation, jokes and anecdotes so that the letters, with their surprising asides, are enjoyable to read, even as they inform with their biographical and intellectual content. The two authors also frequently refer to the university poetry journals and literary magazines they contributed to or edited, and they write about the poetry meetings they attended and the writers they met or read. Their involvement in literary groups and their dealings with publishers, editors and agents are indicative of the publishing mechanisms of the time. This correspondence thus not only provides insight into the work of both B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose, but also conjures up a comprehensive picture of the London literary world of the 1960s.

From 1959 to 1973, the writers B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose regularly wrote letters to each other in which they discussed their own work and literary preoccupations. They exchanged early drafts of poems, short stories, plays and novels, and their correspondence contains detailed comments and extended analyses of these texts, as well as illuminating reflections on literature, criticism, poetics and aesthetics. Though much of the correspondence is an extended literary discussion, it also contains moments of personal revelation, jokes and anecdotes so that the letters, with their surprising asides, are enjoyable to read, even as they inform with their biographical and intellectual content. The two authors also frequently refer to the university poetry journals and literary magazines they contributed to or edited, and they write about the poetry meetings they attended and the writers they met or read. Their involvement in literary groups and their dealings with publishers, editors and agents are indicative of the publishing mechanisms of the time. This correspondence thus not only provides insight into the work of both B. S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose, but also conjures up a comprehensive picture of the London literary world of the 1960s.

Anyone wishing to write short stories and novels will learn from The Art of Creating Fiction how some eminent writers, such as William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, created their art. By giving the new writer an understanding of fiction as it has been produced by the great novelists, The Art of Creating Fiction serves a double purpose: it is an implicit manual on how to write fiction and at the same time a work that provokes, challenges and inspires the new writer to cultivate an ambition for greatness.

The river flowed in a dark, narrow channel. Light filtered in diagonal streaks through the canopy of overhanging trees. Cries from unseen animals filled the air from time to time. Flocks of parrots went shrieking past overhead, almost drowning out the clatter of the diesel of the battered old boat, The Princess Isabella, that chugged its way into the dark Amazon jungle. On board the boat, sprawled in a hammock, Cesar Calderon stared into the dank nothingness. He had just deserted a pregnant mistress and abandoned his business. In a bar in Santa Rosa a strange man had threatened to kill him. A man to whom he had done nothing, had in no way provoked, yet who claimed he, Calderon, owed him his life. Perhaps Calderon had no alternative but to fulfil a bewildering yet murderous destiny. For had his grandmother not offered him this disturbing advice: 'Go and find your father, hug him and embrace him, but stick a knife in his chest and let him fall at your feet.' For in this haunting work of fiction the son must both abandon and become the father, and the father must always embrace death in the person of the son. Writing in a style of deceptive simplicity, Zulfikar Ghose weaves a magical spell. Don Bueno is both straightforward and rich in resonance and symbol, wonderfully dreamlike yet solidly of and about this world. In this, his ninth novel, he demonstrates once again that he is a writer of increasing stature and accomplishment who makes his own way and creates his own world without regard for facile trends or shifting tastes.

A novel by the author of "A New History of Torments", "The Fiction of Reality" and "Figures of Enchantment". It features the character Urim who wanders the world, and yet in finding the end of his journey, he sees the mirror image of its beginning.

No matter how many times he did his sums, Filipe Gamboa's salary never amounted to his daydream. He would always want more than he possessed. He longed for a great fortune not only for a luxury apartment and a Mercedes Benz but also to ensure his daughter, Mariana, had the best possible future with the best possible education. His misfortune is to be passed over at work, and then arrested at a political demonstration. After which he is put in a small boat and abandoned in the ocean . . . But when death seems inevitable, another world beckons. New lives can be swapped for old, and Gamboa on his mysterious island sanctuary can create an illusion that the intervening years have not passed, and that his idea of the past is merely a foreknowledge of the future. With poetic insight and surreal logic Zulfikar Ghose depicts a universe where individuals are inextricably bound by the perversities of fate, able only to dream escape.