| Snake Catcher
Naiyer Masud; translated from Urdu by Muhammad Umar Memom
5 1/4” x 8” • 320 pages
ISBN 9781566566922 • hardback • $24.95 •
"Even shorn of its immense humanity, Masud's lyricism would dazzle, for he is, without doubt, a poet's storyteller." -Agha Shahid Ali
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Snake Catcher is the second collection of the acclaimed master story teller Naiyer Masud’s work to appear in English. Four stories from his first collection, Seemiya (an Arabic word which can mean a number of things, among them "metamorphosis" or "the art of creating illusions"), appear here, along with seven more.
Readers of world literature may find something of Kafka’s influence in these stories—or Borges, or Garcia Marquez, or Murakami. But it’s surely best to speak of these fictions as pure Masud, as no other has rendered a fictional world like this one. Imagine that a single arch is all that remains of a once grand and storied building, and say that a story might be like that arch: spare, precise, singular, open, a portal affording a glimpse of an elaborate past and an uncertain future, of this world and a dream world beyond. Wasn’t there—once—a house? A city of arches and passageways and verandas? A lover peering in the window? Whatever else remains indeterminate in these eleven stark stories, it is certain that at the center of each stands a solitary "I," one among family and neighbors, one from whose consciousness the story emerges. Pulled along by this always compelling voice, we inhabit in these stories a world in which illusions are stark as day, and the threads by which we take hold of life are only kindness, and mystery, and want.
Naiyer Masud was born in 1936 in Lucknow, India, where he lives to this day, in Adabistan (Abode of Literature), the house his father built. A scholar of Persian and Urdu and a renowned translator of Kafka and contemporary Iranian fiction, he began writing stories in early boyhood. He has published three highly acclaimed collections in Urdu, including the previously translated Essence of Camphor (1999).
Muhammad Umar Memon is professor of Islamic studies, Urdu, and Persian at the University of Wisconsin. He has translated extensively from modern Urdu, and is the author of, among other books, The Colour of Nothingness: Modern Urdu Short Stories and The Tale of the Old Fisherman: Contemporary Urdu Short Stories. He serves as editor of the Annual of Urdu Studies. Interlink Books
"The most extraordinary fictional voice to have emerged in world literature this decade."
--Amit Chaudhuri "[Masud] writes for the thinking, feeling individual who desires to take the time to ponder the words on the page. 'Snake Catcher'...is a triumph of the spare and enigmatic. The language is dreamlike and restrained, almost surreal... He has been aptly compared to Kafka, Borges, Poe, Dostoevsky, and others. At the root of writing like this is the ability to imagine, to become fully engaged with the story on the page, to become more of an active participant in the understanding and explication of the story because what Masud leaves out is equally as important as what he includes."
--Michelle Reale, India Currents "[Masud's] stories, always told in the first person, possess the texture and the logic of dreams. The peculiar universe and unusual emphasis of the stories of 'Snake Catcher', brought to life in a prose of great stateliness and majesty, mark him out as an absolute original. Like the work of Borges or Kafka, to whom he has been compared... his stories puzzle and disturb in equal measure. Houses and trees acquire a strange luminosity in his work."
--Chandrahas Choudhury, Daily News & Analysis
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