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The Collaborator Paperback – 24 Feb 2011

by
Mirza Waheed (Author)
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Mirza Waheed (Author)
3.5 out of 5 stars 16 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Viking (24 Feb. 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0670918954
  • ISBN-13: 978-0670918959
  • Product Dimensions: 15.3 x 2.3 x 23.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,025,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

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 )

About the Author

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir. He moved to Delhi when he was eighteen to study English Literature at the University of Delhi and worked as a journalist in the city for four years. He came to London in 2001 to join the BBC's Urdu Service, where he now works as an editor.

Waheed attended the Arvon Foundation in 2007. The Collaborator is his first novel.

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsThis is a powerful debut by a fresh new voice that will sear itself on the memory.
By Pamreader on 25 April 2011
Format: Kindle Edition
I found myself in tears as I turned the last page of this novel.

The narrator is an unnamed 19-year-old boy in a village in Kashmir, situated close to the Line of Control that was agreed by Pakistan and India. He's the last boy in the village and the headman's son.

The opening chapter introduces us to Captain Kardian, his Indian Army employer. A man who drinks too much and cares too little about the grim job that he and his men carry out every day. It's their job to shoot any Kashmiri, who are classed as insurgents or freedom fighters (depending on your point of view), who attempt to return home across the border.

It's the narrator's job to pick over those bodies as they lie scattered in their thousands among the delicate yellow flowers in the valley that was once his childhood playground. We never do learn his name, but we do learn the name and character traits of his friends: Hussain, Gul, Ashfaq and Mohammed, friends whom he believes left him behind when they disappeared suddenly to cross the border.

Each day, as the narrator picks Identity Cards and guns off the dead, while the cloying scent of death seeps into his clothes and skin, he dreads finding his friends. Unlike the Captain the narrator has empathy for the deceased. During one of his first trips to the valley he falls asleep among them and in a wakeful dream state has a conversation with one of them. This was a deeply moving technique to share the stories of the dead.

The narrator has conflicting feelings about being left behind. While part of him wants to join his friends, the other part appreciates the painful sense of loss that is felt by the parents that they have left behind. They do not know if their sons ever made it. Can he inflict that pain on his own parents?Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsBrave, engrossing, important
By Markbooks on 31 Oct. 2011
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.Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsDramatic Dilemmas lit with a Damp Fuse
By Antenna TOP 500 REVIEWER on 26 Sept. 2011
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".Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsA debut that is likely to divide readers

In a set of data, disputed by India, Mirza Waheed states that over 70,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, a further 8,000 have disappeared and 25,000 children have... Read more

Published 4 months ago by Dr R
2.0 out of 5 starsTwo Stars

Very slow, gruesome descriptions of life in Kashmir.

Published 22 months ago by A. De Saulles
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Not an especially uplifting novel but honest and revealing.

Published 23 months ago by Geoff
2.0 out of 5 starsDissapointing read- good delivery

I have full support of Mirza Waheed's work in bringing light to the plight of Kashmiris, however this book was a disappointment. Read more

Published on 8 Jan. 2014 by Firdous
1.0 out of 5 starscollaborator

dripping with narcisstic prose that is bound to catch the heart of Guardian reading female.The novel skips lightly over the fact that Pundits(Hindus) who were mainly teachers at... Read more

Published on 10 Feb. 2013 by S. Patel
5.0 out of 5 starsAtmospheric and gripping

This book grabbed me from the start. I took it on holiday and read it flat out in a couple of days and wished it was twice as long. Read more

Published on 30 Jan. 2013 by Speedy Reader
5.0 out of 5 starsOne more Well written book on kashmir

Fantastic , honest and indeed tragic book ..Indian occupation has surely destroyed this beautiful place. Read more

Published on 20 Oct. 2011 by I.Jan
2.0 out of 5 starsDisappointing

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 on 30 Jun. 2011 by Compendium
5.0 out of 5 starsCertainly my read of the year 2011

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... Read more

Published on 19 Jun. 2011 by Songlines
5.0 out of 5 starsTruthful portrayal

Excellent book , with a genuine truthful portrayal of the current situation in Indian administered Kashmir. Read more

Published on 27 Mar. 2011 by Creative

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