#broken verses

[universitybookstore]

If you still haven’t read young British novelist Kamila Shamsie yet, you’re missing a treat.  Her latest, Home Fire, is out now in the US from Riverhead Books.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Broken Verses | Author: Kamila Shamsie | Publisher: Mariner Books (2005)

[jareeri]

pleasantly surprised with kamila shamsie’s queer subplot involving an older pakistani woman | broken verses

[streetpants-blog]

Please take me away:

And under-statedly,

without compensation

refrain yourself, please,

from engaging in conversion.

As It would seem

that in vagueness,

that in absence:

fondness manifests.

So take me away in your silence

and let me paint in vagueness

the absence of dull absolutes

and the affinity of the unknown.

[sahib-e-dil]

Silently. Prayer is as quiet and as resonant as a single raindrop falling on a desert.

Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses

[sahib-e-dil]

Self-analysis! It’s self-narrative, that’s what it is. Create a story about yourself, and shape everything to fit that story. In my story I was always the one driven mad by love for you, even before I met you. I don’t know how to interpret my actions now that I’m falling into an entirely different sort of insanity–the insanity of a twilight life, in which there is no distinction to be made between real and fictional worlds…If I am no longer the man mad with love with you, does that mean I’m not me anymore?

Kamila Shamsie, Broken Verses