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Review
With flashes of brilliance, tenderness and fury, The Collaborator does what fiction should. It makes you listen. The tragedy unfolding in Kashmir is not easy to write about without falling into platitudes and empty slogans. Mirza Waheed pulls it off (Arundhati Roy )
I loved it. The voice is lyrical, to match the beauty of Kashmir, and yet is tinged with melancholy and grief. I was shaking at times, was livid at times and was moved to tears ultimately (Nadeem Aslam, Author Of Maps For Lost Lovers )
Devastating . . . haunting . . . gripping in its narrative drama (Kamila Shamsie Guardian )
Compelling . . . An important and poetic testimony to an all-too-easily forgotten war (Daily Mail )
Waheed's prose burns with the fever of anger and despair; the scenes in the valley are exceptional, conveying, a hallucinatory living nightmare that has become an everyday reality for Kashmiris (Metro )
Waheed builds an atmosphere of menace and despair . . . his tale possesses a disturbing power that is both lingering and profound (Independent on Sunday )
A thrilling, powerful debut (Sunday Times )
A beautifully realized account of horror, grief and the psychological trauma of war (Observer )
I loved it. The voice is lyrical, to match the beauty of Kashmir, and yet is tinged with melancholy and grief. I was shaking at times, was livid at times and was moved to tears ultimately (Nadeem Aslam, Author Of Maps For Lost Lovers )
Devastating . . . haunting . . . gripping in its narrative drama (Kamila Shamsie Guardian )
Compelling . . . An important and poetic testimony to an all-too-easily forgotten war (Daily Mail )
Waheed's prose burns with the fever of anger and despair; the scenes in the valley are exceptional, conveying, a hallucinatory living nightmare that has become an everyday reality for Kashmiris (Metro )
Waheed builds an atmosphere of menace and despair . . . his tale possesses a disturbing power that is both lingering and profound (Independent on Sunday )
A thrilling, powerful debut (Sunday Times )
A beautifully realized account of horror, grief and the psychological trauma of war (Observer )
Review
With flashes of brilliance, tenderness and fury, The Collaborator does what fiction should. It makes you listen. The tragedy unfolding in Kashmir is not easy to write about without falling into platitudes and empty slogans. Mirza Waheed pulls it off -- Arundhati Roy I loved it. The voice is lyrical, to match the beauty of Kashmir, and yet is tinged with melancholy and grief. I was shaking at times, was livid at times and was moved to tears ultimately -- Nadeem Aslam, Author Of Maps For Lost Lovers Devastating ... haunting ... gripping in its narrative drama -- Kamila Shamsie Guardian Compelling ... An important and poetic testimony to an all-too-easily forgotten war Daily Mail Waheed's prose burns with the fever of anger and despair; the scenes in the valley are exceptional, conveying, a hallucinatory living nightmare that has become an everyday reality for Kashmiris Metro Waheed builds an atmosphere of menace and despair ... his tale possesses a disturbing power that is both lingering and profound Independent on Sunday A thrilling, powerful debut Sunday Times A beautifully realized account of horror, grief and the psychological trauma of war Observer
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Mirza Waheed's 'The Collaborator' shines a light on the often forgotten Kashmiri conflict through the eyes of a teenage boy who grows up in the remote village of Nowgam on the disputed Line of Control.
Waheed tells a harrowing story of long-standing, senseless violence in a beautiful land of precipitous valleys and high peaks, "some shining, some white, some brown, like layers of piled up fabrics".
Born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir, the author handles such a sensitive subject well, framing the crushing brutality within a very human tale of betrayal as the narrator's three close friends disappear over the border to join the militant struggle:
"Two years ago, Hussain was the first to disappear from the village. The musically possessed, the gentlest and the noblest of the group, was the first to fall. We had met as usual in the street on a Sunday evening, and had bantered away into the night. But the next evening, he was gone. Vanished. That evening he had looked calm, relaxed, as usual, moving from one foot to the other as he always did, while he listened to Gul Khan's retelling of his latest infatuation. Gul had taken a liking to Nuzhat, Commander Chechi's dimwit daughter, or more accurately, her swelling chest, and was trying hard to make his anecdote funny to give us the impression that he wasn't too serious about the girl. Like the rest of us that sweet October evening, Hussain listened, and laughed, but the next evening he was gone."
Stranded in his village, the narrator is forced to collaborate with the Indian forces and is given the thankless job of heading into the valley to count the corpses and loot their personal effects, fearing each day that he will discover the bodies of his friends among them.
'The Collaborator', longlisted for the Guardian First Book award, is a brave first novel. If it occasionally falters - the boy's tormentor, Captain Kadian, is a drunk, bloodthirsty tyrant whose total lack of redeeming features makes his frequent, profanity-spilled rants a struggle - Waheed's plot remains admirably free from cliché.
Since Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize for 'White Tiger', it has become almost fashionable to embrace bright new fiction from the sub-continent. Yet many have failed: strip away their vividity, and they have precious little left to say. The same accusation cannot be levelled at Waheed. 'The Collaborator' is as important as it is engrossing, and its author most certainly one to watch.
Waheed tells a harrowing story of long-standing, senseless violence in a beautiful land of precipitous valleys and high peaks, "some shining, some white, some brown, like layers of piled up fabrics".
Born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir, the author handles such a sensitive subject well, framing the crushing brutality within a very human tale of betrayal as the narrator's three close friends disappear over the border to join the militant struggle:
"Two years ago, Hussain was the first to disappear from the village. The musically possessed, the gentlest and the noblest of the group, was the first to fall. We had met as usual in the street on a Sunday evening, and had bantered away into the night. But the next evening, he was gone. Vanished. That evening he had looked calm, relaxed, as usual, moving from one foot to the other as he always did, while he listened to Gul Khan's retelling of his latest infatuation. Gul had taken a liking to Nuzhat, Commander Chechi's dimwit daughter, or more accurately, her swelling chest, and was trying hard to make his anecdote funny to give us the impression that he wasn't too serious about the girl. Like the rest of us that sweet October evening, Hussain listened, and laughed, but the next evening he was gone."
Stranded in his village, the narrator is forced to collaborate with the Indian forces and is given the thankless job of heading into the valley to count the corpses and loot their personal effects, fearing each day that he will discover the bodies of his friends among them.
'The Collaborator', longlisted for the Guardian First Book award, is a brave first novel. If it occasionally falters - the boy's tormentor, Captain Kadian, is a drunk, bloodthirsty tyrant whose total lack of redeeming features makes his frequent, profanity-spilled rants a struggle - Waheed's plot remains admirably free from cliché.
Since Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize for 'White Tiger', it has become almost fashionable to embrace bright new fiction from the sub-continent. Yet many have failed: strip away their vividity, and they have precious little left to say. The same accusation cannot be levelled at Waheed. 'The Collaborator' is as important as it is engrossing, and its author most certainly one to watch.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This novel exposes the plight of muslims living in the Indian-controlled sector of Kashmir, doomed to suffer whether or not they are militant. It has the ingredients for a powerful and moving tale, narrated by the anonymous son of a village headman in the wild, beautiful mountains close to the disputed border. One by one, members of his close-knit group of teenage friends disappear, leaving him haunted with questions. Why did they not include him in their plans to leave? Have they really crossed the border to join Pakistani training camps? How many have been killed in attempts to infiltrate back as terrorists? When, sickened by military reprisals, all the villagers have decamped apart from his stubborn father and long-suffering mother, the narrator is forced to become a "collaborator", searching the mutilated corpses of infiltrators to collect ID cards and weapons. Is his main motivation just to earn money for his family, or does he seek to find the bodies of his friends?
Although I wanted to be gripped and impressed, I found this book very hard to read. The plot is too slight to sustain a full-length novel, without very skilful writing. In the lengthy first part, the author rambles through the chapters like a traveller without a compass. Despite the vivid descriptions of the striking landscape and the villagers' simple lives, when it comes to the relations between characters, the style becomes stilted and wooden. I found it hard to distinguish individual characters or to care about them. The narrator's endless speculation over his friends' fates becomes repetitious and tedious.
The narrator's "voice" is inconsistent: sometimes, he is a confused teenager, at other times he sounds more like the author, describing the village as "settling down to stasis". The writer's penchant for flowery writing works quite well for passages on spiritual matters, the burning of corpses to save them from desecration, and so on. However, when describing incidents, the style often becomes quite clumsy, with prose inadequate to the task and a frequent jarring misuse of words - I had to resist the urge to seize a red pen and correct it.
To give just one example of how the clotted prose undermines the dramatic effect:
"...Ramazan Choudhury's elder son - the same man who had worked on the mosque and whose two children I had seen at Noor's shop buying éclairs and whose full name, Ishaq Jan Choudhary, I only got to know now when we were paired together in the hunt for X's body - and I were scouring the area around the dirt track that goes away from the village and tails off into the footpath to the valley, when we saw X's ..body lying near a narrow stream running down from the mountain."
What were the editors fulsomely cited at the end, not to mention the author himself who is a BBC editor, thinking of?
Although I wanted to be gripped and impressed, I found this book very hard to read. The plot is too slight to sustain a full-length novel, without very skilful writing. In the lengthy first part, the author rambles through the chapters like a traveller without a compass. Despite the vivid descriptions of the striking landscape and the villagers' simple lives, when it comes to the relations between characters, the style becomes stilted and wooden. I found it hard to distinguish individual characters or to care about them. The narrator's endless speculation over his friends' fates becomes repetitious and tedious.
The narrator's "voice" is inconsistent: sometimes, he is a confused teenager, at other times he sounds more like the author, describing the village as "settling down to stasis". The writer's penchant for flowery writing works quite well for passages on spiritual matters, the burning of corpses to save them from desecration, and so on. However, when describing incidents, the style often becomes quite clumsy, with prose inadequate to the task and a frequent jarring misuse of words - I had to resist the urge to seize a red pen and correct it.
To give just one example of how the clotted prose undermines the dramatic effect:
"...Ramazan Choudhury's elder son - the same man who had worked on the mosque and whose two children I had seen at Noor's shop buying éclairs and whose full name, Ishaq Jan Choudhary, I only got to know now when we were paired together in the hunt for X's body - and I were scouring the area around the dirt track that goes away from the village and tails off into the footpath to the valley, when we saw X's ..body lying near a narrow stream running down from the mountain."
What were the editors fulsomely cited at the end, not to mention the author himself who is a BBC editor, thinking of?
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This morning I read a straight four hours to finish reading this book. It is a beautifully descriptive account of the life of ordinary people in a small village and how they are affected by senseless killing. The author. by his descriptive narration brings to life the feelings of the different characters and what they are going through. The contrast of beauty and horror is striking and keeps your attention strong. I could not put this book down. At times it read like the horrors of the holocaust, at other times I could picture life in that remote village so clearly that I could have been there, and that is what the author manages to do, to make you feel part of this story, making you cry at times and making you feel almost hopeless at the suffering that human creates for human. This story at times outraged me, it also made me want to know more about how the situation really is in Kashmir, how is it today.
This novel did a lot for me and I would recommend it very strongly.
This novel did a lot for me and I would recommend it very strongly.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Self-interested ballderdash
THE COLLABORATOR is set in and around the village of Nowgam, Kashmir, very near the line of control which represents the frontier between India and Pakistan. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Kartowidjojo
One more Well written book on kashmir
Fantastic , honest and indeed tragic book ..Indian occupation has surely destroyed this beautiful place. Read more
Published 7 months ago by I.Jan
Disappointing
I really wanted to like this book. The Kashmir crisis seems to be one of those intractable conflicts that is omnipresent but difficult to approach for outsiders like me. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Compendium
Truthful portrayal
Excellent book , with a genuine truthful portrayal of the current situation in Indian administered Kashmir. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Creative
Persevere
You have to persevere with this book. The beginning is shocking but it is hard to say for a while where the book is going and then it suddenly kicks in. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Pen pal
Kashmir has found its very own Mohsin Hamid!
This was a good read. Recommend it to all fans of conflict literature. In response to the previous review by "Cleanwinds", your rating is rather unfair and simply based on... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Kashmirologist
One sided and narrow minded picture of the kashmiri struggle
I read this book recently after picking up from the local library as I thought that it might be a good read as it was closer to home. The narration is good but leads one no where. Read more
Published 14 months ago by cleanwinds
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