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The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam
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The Wasted Vigil

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The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam
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Sep 09, 2008 | ISBN 9780307270269

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    Sep 08, 2009 | ISBN 9780307388742

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Praise

“Harrowing yet beautiful. . . . With astonishing lyricism and compassion, Aslam creates unforgettable characters. . . . As gripping as it is affecting.”
Boston Globe

“Extraordinary. . . . Aslam’s determination to gaze resolutely at the darkest side of our many cold and hot wars is what gives The Wasted Vigil its depth and power.”
—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Review of Books

“Unflinching. . . . [Aslam] seeks to reveal the psyche not just of one rural village or one immigrant community but of Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and Afghanistan. The revelations throughout are artful.”
New York Times Book Review

“Heartbreaking. . . . Important. . . . This novel deserves as wide an audience as the recent bestseller The Kite Runner.”
The Oregonian

“The power of Aslam’s novel lives in the explosive adjacency of brutality and love, the poison of fanaticism diluted by the perfume of Persian lilacs.”
O, The Oprah magazine

“Unforgettable. . . . Tragic and beautifully written. Aslam is a major writer.”
—A. S. Byatt

“Even more beautifully written than his much-acclaimed Maps for Lost Lovers.
Financial Times

“Remarkable for being at once topical and timeless—a complex and layered vision of contemporary Afghanistan. . . . Like Michael Ondaatje before him, Aslam has a way of breathing life into larger historical and political backdrops with sensual details and lush interior lives. The Wasted Vigil shimmers with moments of poetic beauty and seems destined, like The English Patient, to become a classic of modern, globalized literature.”
Time Out New York

“A searing, multifaceted novel. . . . You might think that there is a particular specter haunting Afghanistan in these early years of the 21st century—the Taliban—but in Aslam’s penetrating view, there are multiple forces at work there.”
San Francisco Chronicle

“Both lyrical and sharp. . . . It’s a bold task to attempt to point out the similarities between a Muslim fundamentalist’s zeal and an American CIA agent’s righteous view of his job, yet, amid a sweeping story about love, Aslam does exactly this with considerable poise.”
The Christian Science Monitor

“Stunning. . . . In this epic of a novel, Nadeem Aslam’s narrative takes in the explosive realities of Afghanistan. He navigates this minefield with sharp reflexes and a rare poise. . . . Beautiful and brutal.”
—Mohammed Hanif, Independent (UK)

“Ambitious and luminous. . . . Reminds us that fiction can do things that mere reportage can’t. . . . Aslam does not simply appropriate a few headlines for easy currency. He has immersed himself in a country and a culture and drawn upon art, mythology and history to provide an involving and morally complex tale of the ruthless betrayals and the queasy compromises that are made by nations and individuals alike.”
The Sunday Times (London)

“At its core, The Wasted Vigil is not a book about Afghanistan, but of love. . . . Aslam’s Afghanistan is both beautiful and fraught with danger, with stunning images and landscapes that bring his characters’ world to life, all of it rich with symbolism.”
Charleston City Paper

“What the reader finds, in Aslam’s exquisitely written, gripping narrative, is that although war destroys lives and shatters families, and people are capable of the greatest brutality, love and humanity still survive.”
Daily Mail (London)

“The softly gleaming beauty of Aslam’s prose is immediately reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje, and the moral clarity of his concerns heralds a brave new voice in the mold of Salman Rushdie.”
St. Petersburg Times

“Spellbinding—a beautifully drawn web of the fragile connections of trust, misunderstanding, memory, sacrifice, and, against the odds, love, that people who have lost everything else in the deadly stupidity of war must live and die by. Nadeem Aslam is a master of words and arresting images. . . . The sheer, astonishing loveliness of this novel’s language fills the reader with hope that the transformative power of beauty can, somehow, still save the day.”
The Times (London)

“Piercing. . . . There isn’t enough beauty in the world, but isn’t it true that a work of art can be too beautiful? Aren’t there depths of suffering and barbarity that demand that the writer rein in the verbal glory? Nadeem Aslam doesn’t think so, as he proves with his astonishing new novel.”
The Observer (London)

“Enthralling. . . . The Wasted Vigil is a delicate work of art, a tapestry, which connects people in a mesmerizing story of loss, memory and pain, but where humanity and love and its fragility emerge out of the debris.”
New Statesman (London)

Awards

Library Journal Best Books of the Year WINNER 2008

Author Q&A


Q: What made you choose Afghanistan as a setting for THE WASTED VIGIL?
A:
In 1992, when I finished my first novel I more or less tossed a coin to determine what book I would write next: my Afghanistan novel or my British-immigrant novel. Both subjects seemed equally urgent—a bloody civil war had begun in Afghanistan, and the Pakistani immigrant community in Britain seemed well advanced on the path that would lead to the suicide bombings on July 7, 2005. I began to write Maps for Lost Lovers, my immigrant novel, and as soon as I finished it in spring 2003, I started work on THE WASTED VIGIL.

When in the 1980s, the USA and Saudi Arabia began funding and arming the Afghan mujahidin, my family and friends in Pakistan were among the people who warned about the dangers of giving billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Islamic fundamentalists. The predicted horror was unleashed onto the people of Afghanistan soon enough, but it took decades for it to reach the wider world—on September 11, 2001 the consequences became apparent to everyone.

I wanted to explore and record all of that in THE WASTED VIGIL. Afghanistan—a crossroads of history—seemed an appropriate place to discuss the meeting of Islamic and Western culture, the ‘civilising missions’ and the ‘bringing of democracy,’ Napoleon arriving at Alexandria and proclaiming that the teachings of the Koran dovetailed with the principles of revolutionary France.

Q: How did you go about researching the book? Did you travel to Afghanistan?
A:
I traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan during the writing of the book: talking to teahouse owners as well as professors, graveyard attendants as well as museum curators. And in Britain I interviewed almost 200 Afghan refugees about their memories of Afghanistan, about their grief at what had happened to their country.

I traveled with a historian friend which imparted a certain ‘depth’ to my gaze—looking at a landscape, I wasn’t thinking just of the battle that took place there in 1995, but also of Alexander who had crossed it centuries before.

Traveling in Afghanistan I felt something like Kim, having to conceal this or that side of identity, moving between my two nationalities: in some places I had to tell them I was a Pakistani because Pakistanis were liked there, and to be British would have been dangerous. In others I had to confess to being British because Pakistanis were loathed. A large bomb went off in Kabul while I was there and the city, suspecting Pakistani involvement, became filled with anti-Pakistan sentiment.

Q: One of the key characters in THE WASTED VIGIL is a jihadist. How did you get into his head? Was it hard approaching him as a character?
A:
I talked to boys and young men who had attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. It was easy to imagine a jihadist once I realized that they all thought Islam was under threat, that their countries were in danger. The breakthrough came when I thought about what happened on flight United 93 on September 11, 2001. Here is what my jihadist thinks at one point in THE WASTED VIGIL:

Does no one remember what happened on board flight United 93? A group of Americanscivilized people, not barbariansdiscovered that their lives, their country, their land, their cities, their traditions, their customs, their religion, their families, their fellow-countrymen, their past, their present, their future, were under attack, and they decided to risk their lives – and eventually gave up their lives – to prevent the other side from succeeding. He could be wrong but to him that seems a lot like what the Muslim martyrdom bombers think they are doing.

Most of my anger is not directed at the boys who become terrorists, who become suicide bombers. It’d be like getting angry at steel or iron after you have been shot: the suicide bombers are just bullets, are just knives. My rage is aimed at the terrorist leaders, the people who lead the confused rudderless young men astray.

Q: THE WASTED VIGIL seems to criticize the United States as much as it does the fundamentalists. Do you consider it a political novel?
A
: I always say that I vote every time I write a sentence. Politics for me is about feeling a certain responsibility towards the world I live in. From my viewpoint, all writing is political—even nonpolitical writing is political. Coming from Pakistan, and belonging to the Islamic world, I can’t not be aware of how politics affects our daily lives, how it is not just dry legislations and laws and statements. It’s visceral. I lived a stone’s throw from the White House when I taught in Washington, DC earlier this year, and I couldn’t help thinking how certain decisions made in that place in the 1980s became fists as they travelled to Pakistan, fists and hammers that broke my journalist friends’ bodies.

None of this means that my work is composed of slogans. I am first and foremost a novelist. I am happiest when I write something that satisfies me aesthetically but which also repays some of the debt I feel I owe to the world.

Q: Which writers do you admire and did anyone in particular inspire this novel?
A:
Vasko Popa, Ivan Lalic, Czelaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska… I seem to be naming only poets. Among prose writers: Melville, John Berger, VS Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Bruno Schulz.

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