American Dervish : Ayad Akhtar

Image Credit: Borders

After a long time, I was gripped by a book. This was a book I was willing to read well into a sleepless night. And that's big from me as everyone knows how much I love my 8-hours-at-least of good sleep. But American Dervish is just the caffeine that I needed for reading.

Written by young American-born, first generation Pakistani-American Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish is a bristling novel, brimming with poignancy, a masterful tale of suppressed longing and a adolescent's desperate steps into acceptance.

Book Description:

Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes.

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There is more to the book description, but I think readers here don't come looking for book descriptions they can obtain from Amazon. Let me tell you what I feel about the book? After My Name is Mina, this is one of the best books I have read this year. And indeed, one of the best of all time. I don't know how Akhtar has managed to capture such in depth emotions on a taut family landscape. It's only a skilled writer who can make you 'feel' for a book, for its characters, and I am in awe of Akhtar's writing skills at this point. Young Hayat is hopelessly infatuated with Mina - the inscrutable, yet passionate woman from Pakistan, who has fled an abusive marriage to stay with her best friend, Hayat's mother, Muneer. And Muneer herself is struggling in her marriage - her husband Naveed, although one of the most sensible men, and the antidote to Hayat and Mina's ardent Islamic leanings, is very obviously unfaithful.

"What a pleasure to encounter a first novel as self-assured and effortlessly told as Ayad Akhtar’s “American Dervish.”' crows the New York Times in its review  and I can't agree more. Each of the characters make their own choice for life - it's not pretty, and some are hard to understand, but it reminds me of how we lead our own lives, our choices often inscrutable to our own selves. And there is Hayat. He is 10 when Mina comes to his home, and into his life - and he is torn between growing sexual urges, and Mina's own spiritual teachings. He learns from Mina a love of the Quran. And religion and infatuation have also have had interesting consequences.

What impressed me so much in this novel is not the story. It's beautifully told, yes, but there is more than that to American Dervish. Akhtar draws a compelling portrait of ordinary people - and the divisive knives called emotions that we use to deal with them.

Verdict : Trust me. This one is a masterpiece.

Rating : 5/5