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    The Scatter Here Is Too Great
    The Scatter Here Is Too Great
    The Scatter Here Is Too Great
    Ebook189 pages3 hours

    The Scatter Here Is Too Great

    By Bilal Tanweer

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    About this ebook

    A vivid and intricate novel-in-stories, The Scatter Here Is Too Great explores the complicated lives of ordinary people whose fates unexpectedly converge after a deadly bomb blast at a train station in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.

    Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before the blast. His son, a wealthy, middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father and his decimated city, struggles to find words.

    Bilal Tanweer reveals the pain, loneliness, and longing of these characters and celebrates the power of the written word to heal lives and communities plagued by violence. Elegantly weaving together these voices into a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tale as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 5, 2014
    ISBN9780062304445
    The Scatter Here Is Too Great
    Author

    Bilal Tanweer

    Bilal Tanweer was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. His fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in various international journals, including Granta, Vallum, The Caravan, and Words Without Borders. He was selected as a Granta New Voice in 2011 and was named an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan.

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    • 3/5
      Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a collection of linked stories that some reviews have described as a novel (the jacket blurb says it is a “novel-in-stories”). The stories are set in modern Karachi and depict a city driven by a fierce and manic energy, where the desperate inhabitants grapple daily with the threat of violence within an uneasy atmosphere of religious fanaticism and sectarian division. The characters are a disparate group, from various walks of life and strata of society, and include a communist poet, mothers, children, teens, businessmen and young men seeking work. The critical and harrowing event that brings the characters together—or, at least, unifies them behind a common concern—is a bomb blast at a central train station. In each story the characters find themselves, in one manner or another, left to cope with the after-effects of the explosion, either picking up the pieces of their own life or that of someone else. Tanweer’s narrative style mimics the city’s chaotic energy. From the start the action moves quickly, and it is sometimes difficult for the reader to immediately grasp what is going on. Unlike a conventional novel, which gains momentum as an over-arching story assumes shape and form and we come to know a finite set of characters, the episodic structure of The Scatter Here Is Too Great demands that the reader become acquainted with a whole new set of characters every few pages. Eventually, the reader who opened the book expecting a novel will do one of two things: give up, or keep reading with the adjusted expectation that the book is not going deliver that experience. Readers who approach the book expecting a collection of stories will find their attention richly rewarded. Tanweer is a talented and daring writer who speaks in a unique voice about those who go about their business in a world where the necessities of life are not guaranteed and innocent people routinely come under attack. None of these tales are conventionally plotted and some—reminiscent of Garcia-Marquez at his most high-spirited—veer into the realm of magic realism. All in all, an impressive volume by an important young author who writes convincingly and without sentiment about the essentially tragic nature of contemporary urban life.
    • 4/5
      "This scatter I have gathered..make sense of things...read the crystal design on the broken screen", 4 January 2016This review is from: The Scatter Here is Too Great (Hardcover)"Ever seen a bullet-smashed windscreen?" Bilal Tanweer begins this book. "The hole at the centre throws a sharp clean web around itself and becomes crowded with tiny crystals. That's the metaphor for my world, this city: broken, beautiful and born of tremendous violence."Set in his home town of Karachi, this captivating novel is almost a series of short stories, the characters all interlinked somehow, and all coming together when a bomb goes off in the city centre. But the heartache is not just the result of the atrocity: broken families, failure in life, mourning for the past are all beautifully treated in a work that would merit a second reading.I sometimes found myself slightly confused as to who which of the characters I was reading about, but the clues are there. Lovely read!
    • 5/5
      This novel is accompilation of stories revolving around a snapshot of the day of the bombing of the train station in Karachi, Pakistan. We are shown the consequences of each of these lives through portraits painted by the author's words, an interesting look into life in this violent city. My thanks to Goodreads and the author for a complimentary copy.
    • 4/5
      This took me 4 months to read, because each story is so intense. As crisp as the shards of glass.
    • 4/5
      3.5 stars rounded up to 4 since I think I would have enjoyed it more had I read it in a day or two rather than over the course of a week. It would have helped me to more fully appreciate the interconnections of the characters from one story to the next. Despite the bomb blast event, it is not a terribly heavy read, though it does touch upon some deep reflections at times. It is more about the characters and their lives than this actual event. The author has a unique style, but I can’t really put my finger on why, but this uniqueness has a genuine feel to it. It could be that I am just not familiar enough with Pakistani literature, or much of the novel-told-in-stories genre to say for sure how it compares. I was a little disoriented at times, which could be because my reading was too spread out, or that it was intentionally written this way in order to provide the reader with the feel of the chaos and confusion that characters would feel such a traumatic event, much in the way I felt reading Blindness though Saramago used a completely different technique to get that feeling across.All in all, a worthwhile book I will probably return to again when I’ve got a small block of time where I can sit down and read it straight through. I received a complimentary copy via the Goodreads “first reads” program.

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    The Scatter Here Is Too Great - Bilal Tanweer

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