This Is Where The Serpent Lies
By Daniyal Mueenuddin
★★★★★★★★★☆ 9/10
343 pages
What’s it about?
This novel follows a cast of characters through the cities and countryside of Pakistan, showing how the old feudal system has not been completely abandoned.
What did it make me think about?
In so many places, much is determined by the circumstances of your birth.
Should I read it?
The writing in this novel is masterful. Some reviews said the book was slow, but I did not find that to be the case. I was interested enough in the characters to want to pick it back up and find out what was happening to them. I would say that sometimes I would get interested in a storyline, then we would move on to other characters, and I would feel the plot was incomplete. This sense of incompleteness kept this novel from being extraordinary to me. But the story so magnificently demonstrated how the sins/ways of the past so influence societies even today. This book is not only literary but also historical fiction. I learned quite a lot about Pakistan reading this book.
A passage I marked
“In those days, just before the 1970 election, which brought Zufikar Bhutto to power, Zain and even Yazid had grown intoxicated with Bhutto’s socialist rhetoric, a promise that a new era of unimagniable possiblities would soon emerge before their eyes, that elite power in Pakistan would be toppled, the poor raised up, the system remade.”
