Book Review: “Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday” by Jamaluddin Aram
The Absurdity of War
The recent history of Afghanistan has been tumultuous, to say the least. I know firsthand. When Canada was still fighting the War on Terror in the country, I was involved with a Canadian government aid organization that strove to educate people about changing conditions there. Still, things were fraught with peril. Any time that we used a picture of a woman starting her own business in Afghanistan, we would have to carefully crop the photograph lest members of the Taliban see it, recognize the background used in the image, and go to that location to harm (or worse) the woman who was being entrepreneurial. Thus, I feel I have a stake or at least an interest in the upcoming novel Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday. You wouldn’t know this from reading the book, necessarily, but it is set in the early 1990s in a working-class suburb of sorts in Kabul, Afghanistan. A civil war rages on, even though the invading Soviets had been driven out sometime before. This is a dense, challenging novel — one that eschews a linear plot in favour of vignettes that set the scene of a community trying to get by in the face of chaos.
Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday is a book about dreams, too. Its characters have them and they turn out to be oddly prophetic. However, this is a novel about the day-to-day struggle just to get by when the electricity is out, and crossing the street to go to the grocery store is perilous because bullets are whizzing by in all directions. This is also a book about desire — the sexual kind of longing that can only occur when your daily existence may be called into question — and a book, in its last third, about death and trying to preserve in the face of it. The characters of this novel long to lead normal lives although everything is in disarray. The book’s framing device is the fact that three robbers have been breaking into houses in the community, and people are desperate to find out who is robbing them and what they can do to protect themselves. All in all, a lot is happening in Wazirabad, but it’s the individual stories that count the most.
The novel has its plusses and its minuses. On the positive side of the ledger, this is a well-written, almost poetic, read. I know that using the words “well-written” is a bit of a cop-out, but there’s no other way to describe the high quality of writing here. It may help if you have some knowledge of Muslim customs and traditions, a little bit of the Farsi language, and an overall sense of recent events in the history of Afghanistan as a country. Aram assumes that readers will be knowledgeable about all of this, and there is no handholding as the author plunges into setting the book’s scene. In some ways, this book reminded me of the works of Gabriel García Márquez, just without the magic realism (or perhaps a muted sense of magic realism as it turns out that dreams here can sometimes turn true). If that sounds appealing to you, you will get lost in this novel. The downside for me was that the book can be quite confusing at times — not just for the fact that the author assumes you have prior knowledge of certain things. For instance, the characters are named by their first names but also, at different times in the book, the names of their occupations, so you, in effect, must keep track of “double” the characters and sort out who’s who. The novel also leaps from character to character — and someone who you think is going to play an important role in the “plot” of the book will suddenly disappear and be never heard from again. This will either be infuriating or charming depending on how much you like being challenged by the books that you read.
At the end of the day, Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday is not a read that everyone will appreciate. This is elevated art that will appeal to those who seek out literary fiction. As the author resides in Toronto now, I wonder if this novel will have a shot at a big-name Canadian literary award, such as the Giller Prize. Despite the richness of the writing, I did find that the book stopped on a dime and the last half of the book wasn’t as captivating as the first, as minor characters die off in different ways and influence those left behind. Having said that, the book is a marvelous first effort, and I must wonder what will come next from the pen of Jamaluddin Aram. The author acutely discusses what it is like to live a life during wartime where life tries to go on as it always had, to some degree. There is a lot to savour here, so if you like your reads to challenge and even sometimes frustrate you — the sign of a book that is trying to teach you how to read it — then you will find a lot to discover with Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday. To put it succinctly, this is a book certain people will enjoy — and having some investment in the plight of the Afghani people is part of the package. It’s certainly an educating eye-opener in some respects, so the curious should approach this novel with no trepidation. It’s worth trying out and may reward the patient reader who is probably the best kind of audience for a book where a lot of bad things happen, but people still persevere. It’s a curio.
Jamaluddin Aram’s Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday will be published by Simon & Schuster on June 6, 2023.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
