The Cloud Messenger [Paperback]

What do you do when a book is so beautifully written that it makes you want to cry -- and yet leaves you strangely numb and distanced from the narrative and the characters? In my case, you read it twice before sitting down to write a review that tries to do justice to the prose and to your disappointment at the absence of a plot to support the kinds of themes that engaged you enough to pick it up and read it in the first place.

Aamer Hussein is an accomplished author who has produced a few volumes of short stories; his sentences sound like poetry (suitably, since the main character's fascination with Urdu and Persian poesy is partly at the heart of the narrative). Sadly, the "novel" that is formed from these sentences ends up feeling like a series of poetic vignettes stapled together. If you want to feel erudite by osmosis; if you only read to relish the caliber of the prose; if you cherish books by uber-literary authors outside the mainstream, you might love it. But reading through it twice had one useful and lasting effect: not delight in a well-told tale, perhaps, but I ended up spending some time pondering what it is that makes a prose narrative a novel.

This attempt at doing so is the story of Mehran's life, told in fits and starts, moving rapidly from one experience and encounter to another and drawing on themes but never really making Mehran feel real or very compelling. (He's the kind of character to whom things happen; a strangely lackluster figure.) Those observations range from the pedantic ("He teaches for 15, sometimes 02 hours a week -- he is, again, teaching large groups on Mondays and Thursdays, and also an Indian History module to undergraduates. He's often too tired to do anything but read a few pages of a novel in the evenings. ... His job at the university, though he's a dutiful and conscientious teacher, is only a job, and he would have been as diligent at any other...") to the eloquent internal monologues as Mehran ponders an emotion, a woman, an experience, a sight, sound or smell. That, and a few vignettes that depict the main relationships in his life (or at least what the reader can only suppose to be the main relationships) don't add up to a novel, even one with an unconventional structure. It's like looking at a piece of knitting designed to be art, and trying to figure out how one would wear it.

The narrator coyly refers in the book to Mehran's efforts at autobiographical writings -- Hussein himself notes in an afterward that this is "the story of some of the paths I might have taken" and reflects his own fascination with Urdu literature. Ultimately, I ended up wanting to read some of the poets he quotes liberally in the book, but remained feeling very distanced from Mehran and unimpressed with his creator's effort to build a narrative out of emotions and fleeting events and encounters, however beautifully observed. Fabulous writing needs a structure and the very loosely interwoven tale of Mehran's encounters with Riccarda, Marvi and Marco never add up to a convincing narrative. This is a work of art, perhaps, but not a story. Perhaps I'm misjudging it and it's a prose poem??? Even so, I don't care enough about Mehran as a character or the abrupt shifts from the mundane experiences of his life from the 1950s to the dawn of the new century to go back and revisit it a third time to test that hypothesis. 3 stars, mostly awarded for the writing and the poetic insights.

The good news? I will be heading to the library in hopes of finding works by Shauq and Hafez. And I might -- one day -- take a look at some of this author's short stories, in hopes that his narrative style works better with that form.