MIGR JOURNEYS

In his first novel in English, the celebrated Urdu writer Hussein limns the immigrant experience with such acumen and subtlety, it's easy to forget he's tackling one of modern literature's more exhausted themes. Thirty-some years removed from his native India, Amir recalls the early years of his arrival in England, when he and 17 fellow illegal aliens "came home to the dark of that cave-like house, to sit and talk and do as real men do everywhere, dream of lumpsums of money and ways of escaping." Through Amir's eyes, Hussein masterfully captures the collective conscience of laborers broken by hostile environs. When one of the men in the house dies, for seven days many of the men read from the Quran, but no one removes the body, for fear they'll be caught and deported. Interwoven with Amir's narrative is that of his 19-year old daughter Parvin, who we find hiding from her father in a basement and who, along with her mother and brother, has turned against him. Although their narratives never intersect, taken side by side they enrich each other, describing the emotional complexity of two generations at once trapped and nurtured by their heritage. At school, Parvin tells her classmates that Indian food was not like their "half-boiled cattlefeed." Yet she dates an English boy and rejects her father's insistence on an arranged marriage. Amir is equally contradictory in his opinions of their new world. The story's starkness—which at moments threatens to turn maudlin—is tempered by a wry humor that further captures Hussein's flair for paradox. It's a world where women triumph, but barely, and at the expense of the men. (Aug.)