The Scatter Here Is Too Great

by Bilal Tanweer

A vivid and intricate novel-in-stories, The Scatter Here Is Too Great explores the complicated lives of ordinary people whose fates unexpectedly converge after a deadly bomb blast at the Karachi train station: an old communist poet; his wealthy, middle-aged son; a young man caught in an unpleasant, dead-end job; a girl who spins engaging tales to conceal her heartbreak; and a grief-stricken writer, who struggles to make sense of this devastating tragedy.

Bilal Tanweer reveals the pain, loneliness, and longing of these characters and celebrates the power of the written word to heal lives and communities plagued by violence. Elegantly weaving together different voices into a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tale as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.

Genres: Fiction, Pakistan, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Cultural, Novels

208 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2013

Reviews

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it—not even grieve, because you knew that it will happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow. This city was full of bottled-up grief.


“A beautiful debut, and a blood-soaked love letter to Karachi.” -Mohammed Hanif

Bilal Tanweer's The Scatter Here is Too Great is the most emotional and intense book I have ever read on the violence and tragedies happened in Karachi. Growing up, we used to watch what was happening in Karachi in news and some days, my father would change the channel because the violence was too much for us children to watch. I still remember those bomb blasts, the target killings and the sectarian clashes that left their mark on this country's history.
Thousands of my countrymen lost their lives and although I have never been to Karachi, I believe that the streets there still mourn the violence they have witnessed.
This book is kind of a eulogy to Karachi's sufferings. The writing style is unique, different characters, a young boy, a father, a brother, a mad-poet, a writer, a storyteller, all having their own stories. All connected with a bomb blast accident, some lost their family members and some lost their belief in true stories.
This book is not a delusion, that would tell the readers that how miraculously people survived in Karachi and lived happily ever after. This book is brutally honest. It will leave you with an ache in your heart and you will just sit there with tears in your eyes for the people we have lost. You don't know them but this book will remind you that there were people, people full of love and passion, whom we lost to the violence we are still battling.

[Aditi · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often
abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.”

----Aberjhani

Bilal Tanweer, a Pakistani author, has penned a poignant tale of five different characters whose lives are devastated after a sudden bomb blast in Karachi and how terrorism fails to bring the peace that these characters are desperately looking for in a city tormented by violence, defected and biased political agendas and terrorism in his award-winning book, The Scatter Here Is Too Great.


Synopsis:

A vivid and intricate novel-in-stories, The Scatter Here Is Too Great explores the complicated lives of ordinary people whose fates unexpectedly converge after a deadly bomb blast at the Karachi train station: an old communist poet; his wealthy, middle-aged son; a young man caught in an unpleasant, dead-end job; a girl who spins engaging tales to conceal her heartbreak; and a grief-stricken writer, who struggles to make sense of this devastating tragedy.

Bilal Tanweer reveals the pain, loneliness, and longing of these characters and celebrates the power of the written word to heal lives and communities plagued by violence. Elegantly weaving together different voices into a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tale as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.


Five characters, nine stories, which are neither stories nor an interconnected bunch of tales, instead they are fragments of memories, feelings and realizations of five individuals whose lives are somehow affected by a bomb blast at a railway station in the city of Karachi. These characters might not have been directly affected by the blast, as they have either lost a long distance friend or an acquaintance or a family relative or simply by the mere sight of so many dead bodies. And somehow, some of the characters are connected by an invisible thread with some, thereby satisfying the readers to some extent. At one time, the readers will see an ex-communist, a crazy poet and a failed husband and a father while reciting one of his poems is getting mocked by the young passengers on the bus before being claimed by the deadly bomb blast, then in another, the readers will be introduced with a love-sick teenage girl narrating unreal fairy tales to her little brother, whose boyfriend has been claimed by that blast. Then, in another fragment, the readers will see another teenage boy stealing his mother's car to pick up his date amidst the sea of death and hate in the city affected by the blast, an ambulance driver is left paralyzed with the sight of so much death and blood thereby leaving him permanently affected. And in the last fragment, an author goes looking for his long-lost friend, whose life has been claimed by the blast, instead he realized so many things about his estranged father.

To be honest, the readers might feel a bit disconnected with the characters as they lack depth but the readers can easily comprehend with the pain, sufferings and the emotions of the characters thereby will be left deeply moved by their worlds. The characters which are portrayed as real-life, flawed and sentimental through their genuine demeanor. This is where the readers will grieve for the characters as well as for the evocative memories of theirs. Although the pain shifts way too quickly from one category or character to another before even the readers are given an opportunity to drown themselves into the depth and intensity of such affliction of the characters.

The city of Karachi is vividly painted into the backdrop of this novel where the author has vividly arrested the crowd life of the city by highlighting the nasty streets, moldy smelling alleys, shabby houses and debris filled sea beaches filled with so many innocent and simple souls. And through the portrayal, the author brings out the corruptness and the defected politics of the city as it is left immobilized by terrorism and the extreme religion followers. Yes, the readers will be transportraed to this tortured city almost immediately while reading the book and can easily visualize the scenes right before their eyes.

The writing of this debut author my not be that polished, but is laced with enough emotions to make the readers feel with it. The narrative is very disjointed and at times, it might confuse the readers, since there is no protagonist in each of the stories. The pacing is fast, as the chapters are short and quick. The major disappointment would be that the stories aren't that striking or even fails to make the readers contemplate with it.

In a nutshell, although this book turned out to be the most anticipating read after its publication, yet I feel the story failed to interest me or let me look beyond some of the predictably related characters into their soul.

Verdict: Read it only if you want to see the honest brutality in Karachi through the eyes of the author, otherwise, skip it.

[Jibran · Rating 3 out of 5]

A common thread runs through the many narratives: The quest to make sense of the beloved city through a period of turmoil and turbulence; a place that once was but that no longer is. The personal failures in the lives of its many protagonists are superimposed on the failure of the city to give them peace and provide succour.

As a whole, the book fell short of my expectations. Some portions of the stories make for an interesting read in an otherwise rather lacking-in-depth collection of tales that failed to pique my interest.

The circumstantial similarities between a few characters (i.e; their alienation with their fathers) left me rather confused half way through the book as to which character’s story I was actually reading.

The division of the book into 5 main chapters with further sub-chapters without any clear delineation of stories/characters gets one’s head all muddled up, moreso because some stories are broken into two or more parts and told at different places in the book.

The story (Good Days) of the employee of the private security firm is overrun by ill-used swear words. Whoever said it’s a good idea to use such words in abundance (fuck, fucking, motherfucker, sisterfucker, chutiya, chute etc) in a tight space of a few pages obviously gave a bad piece of advice.

I do realise it’s a debut effort and therefore I must not be too harsh with my criticisms. But the author has been promoted as the “up-and-coming” voice of Pakistani English fiction, a new talent “to watch out for” and thrown into limelight thanks to his impeccable social networking skills, long before he produced his first book. Naturally, dedicated readers of South Asian, particularly Pakistani, fiction have been waiting for his debut work with high expectations.

However, there are a few instances in the book deserving of recognition and, yes, appreciation.

The last story particularly stands out. It’s told by the adult voice of the child protagonist of the opening story: A quest to make sense of the beloved city that has overgrown through the time to become a degenerated and violent place, and that through the life of his deceased father-writer who spent his last days spreading happiness among the people to atone for his own disappointments.

Another story that of the wayward student out on a romantic escapade in his mother’s battered car was good to read. It’s punchline, for me, was the high point of the book. The protagonist takes his mother’s car without her permission. The blast occurs when he’s driving on the bridge with his girlfriend next to him. Luckily they survive the ordeal. Later when they halt on the beach, the guy “cleaned the blood with a rag dipped in the car’s radiator water” because he “couldn’t afford to have anyone find out.” Thus, a very public episode of mayhem and destruction juxtaposed against the personal need to hide the evidence of the blast from his car was amusing, unsettling and ironical.

[Samra Muslim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literature in Pakistan seems have moved on from its slump period, as recently we see a spate of new and young writers venturing to pen down their newer and untold stories. Bilal Tanweer, author of The Scatter Here is Too Great is a debutant writer, joining the new breed of Pakistani fiction writers who aim to do just that.

Reading the book, which is thankfully just near 200 pages, one does feel that Bilal Tanweer has not really be able to communicate his idea on paper cohesively to an average Joe like myself

Full Book Review: http://samramuslim.com/book-review-th...

[Nudrat · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Bilal Tanweer’s debut The Scatter Here Is Too Great, the city of Karachi is a full-fledged character, as vivid and alive as the motley crew of individuals that people it. Like the other complicated and nuanced characters, Tanweer lovingly portrays Karachi in all its beauty and brokenness. Whether it is the litter-strewn beach of Sea View, the inside of a small, dingy café in Cantt Station or the chaotic streets of Empress Market pulsating with the throng of people and vehicles, Tanweer’s descriptions of the city are tinged with an affectionate familiarity, like someone talking about a close friend. This collection of loosely interconnected stories is, therefore, in a large part about Karachi and the characters’ often ambivalent relationship with what one character calls “this ruinously mad city.”

No story about Karachi in a contemporary setting can exist without at least touching upon the violence that regularly plagues this city. Here, too, a thread of violence – a bomb blast at Cantt Station – connects all the stories. But the stories are less about the horrific event itself than about the characters, all of whom are living quiet lives and who face this violence with a mixture of bewilderment and resignation. The characters are varied and distinct, each with his own set of foibles and passions. There is Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet who renounced his family for his cause and who now wanders the streets of Karachi searching for a lost past. There is Sadeq, caught up in a semi-legal job snatching cars for banks from people who have defaulted on their loans and trying to fight the emptiness inside him. There is the little boy struggling to understand the world with the help of the stories his older sister spins for him. And at the center of these characters is a writer, a man grappling with his grief for his deceased father and trying to emulate his father’s uncomplicated love and awe for his city and the world in general, as his own relationship with Karachi is uneasy.

One of the best stories is Lying Low, about a middle-aged businessman visiting his aging mother in their family apartment right around the time a bomb ripples through the neighborhood. There is so much going on in this one story – the man’s guilt at abandoning his mother, his complicated feelings towards his communist father who once left the family and is now seeking reconciliation, his longing for his own estranged son – and Tanweer handles it all with brevity. Another remarkable story is The Truants, a story of two boys who skip school to go to the beach, one trying to adjust to a world without his beloved father and the other preparing in his own way for what he already considers to be a dog-eat-dog world.

Tanweer’s characterization of these distinct individuals is his biggest strength. All of his characters leap off the page, alive and robust. Even secondary characters, those only marginally involved in the narrative are fascinating. As the stories progress, the connections – sometimes fleeting – between the characters come to light. This adds texture to their lives, because a character you read about in one story slides into the next, each new story offering a glimpse of another facet of his life. Another element that Tanweer excels at is making the voice of each character clearly distinctive. Usually in a book where the author is juggling multiple narrators, the different voices all sound more or less the same, but Tanweer’s characters all have their unique tone and manner of speaking. The portions narrated by the writer are more introspective and lyrical, the story narrated by the little boy is fused with a charming innocence and the voice of the cynical Sadeq is more matter-of-fact and snarky. The dialogues are another area where Pakistani authors writing in English often have problems in. A lot of the time the dialogue reads fine in English but doesn’t ring true in any local language. This isn’t the case here. The dialogues flow smoothly and it is easy enough, while reading, to imagine those phrases being said in a local language.

With the subject matter at hand – Karachi with its bomb blasts and never-ending violence – it would have been easy for Tanweer to turn this into an Issue Book, using the characters to make statements about sectarianism, corruption or the other myriad problems this city faces. Luckily, he resists this temptation and lets the characters guide the narrative. This is what makes these stories so compelling and credible – these are ordinary people living ordinary lives. You might find them sitting across your seat in the bus, or living in the next-door apartment; people with their own sadnesses and joys, going about their lives despite the bloodshed around them. As one character remarks, “Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it – not even grieve, because you knew that it would happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow. This city was full of bottled-up grief.”

The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tender portrayal of an often harsh city. It is a remarkable debut, making Bilal Tanweer a wonderful addition to the many Pakistani authors writing in English today.

(Published in Newsline Magazine, Pakistan in February 2014)

[Anum Shaharyar · Rating 3 out of 5]

You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it...We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.

My best friend thought I’d hate this book, and I can see why. There’s almost no sense of proper time-keeping in the storyline, the jumps between character perspectives make no sense and Bilal Tanweer manages to leave almost every ending vague and unanswered.

That being said, the book still rocks. It’s a short quick read, entertaining without being melodramatic, complex without being too heavy-handed, reflective without becoming too morose. And the saving grace is that even though it could easily have turned into a moralistic sermon about death and morality (what another reviewed called ‘An Issue Book’), Bilal Tanweer is more interested in the characters than in the lesson being learned which works well on a subtle level, mixing awareness with entertainment.

The Summary

These stories ... were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city.

The story follows multiple narrators, switching between characters as they experience a day in the city when a bomb goes off at a station right in the heart of Karachi. From the eyes of both young and old, we see how they are all living their own separate lives, and the story shifts perspectives between them, starting with a different person when the bomb hasn’t gone off, moving to another during the explosion, and finally ending up with another person watching the after-effects of the shock.

That's how we lose the city - that's how our knowledge of what the world is is taken away from us - when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what there was and we are left strangers in a place we knew, in a place we ought to have known.

Binding them all together is the writer, an unnamed protagonist who grieves for the burning, chaotic city. He is there in the beginning, middle and end, bringing all the pasts and presents together. On the day of the blast, Comrade Sukhansaz, an old Communist poet, is on his way to meet his estranged son and wife when he’s harassed on a bus by a young group of men. Sadeq, a young man with an angry heart, is getting frustrated with his barely-legal job that involves snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans. A young man takes a beautiful girl out on a date and freaks out when the explosion leaves bloodstains on his car, an ambulance driver sees hallucinations after the bomb and goes numb, a middle-aged man lies in his destroyed lounge after hearing the explosion, worried about his son and missing his estranged father. The story slowly and steadily ties these lives together through these various narratives, painting a three-dimensional picture, of the lives of people who experience such blasts and have to learn to live with them.

The Characters

He said he cared very little for the world. But the truth was different. He was running away from things he loved ... In his crooked messy way he did love people, and in his way, he found that love reciprocated too. But he hated himself for being a criminal.

There is something risky going on in this book, and I was worried it would ruin the whole pleasure of reading: Bilal Tanweer doesn’t bother with exposition, throwing the reader straight into the character’s thoughts headlong, sometimes even without bothering to give us a name. And because a name is usually the first introduction we have to a character, it rankles sometimes that we don’t even know who is talking. And while a number of famous authors have used unnamed protagonists to brilliant effect, (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison), what makes it more risky in this case is that multiple narrators are being used. It could have all crashed and burned, but once one learns to take it in stride, accepting what the author is confidently carrying on, it becomes a quirk. The characters manage to be nameless but three dimensional, which is a feat in its own, and this is something else to, if not admire, then at least respect.

Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes, your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes, you in your own way have become your father.

The Writing

Ever seen a bullet-smashed windscreen? The hole at the centre throws a sharp clean web around itself and becomes crowded with tiny crystals. That’s the metaphor for my world, this city: broken, beautiful, and born of tremendous violence.

It is the writing that impresses. The story’s voice is crisp and clear, its tone confident. The author uses words sparingly, and it works to excellent effect, successfully keeping the reader hooked long enough to turn the next page. In this book, Karachi is a character, alive and breathing, and it is in this personification that the story does its best work.

I realized that was the difference between my father’s stories and mine. He told stories to find ways into the world, to communicate with it. I wrote to avoid the world.

It is also in the subtle connections of the various characters’ lives that the story telling shines through. In most cases, there aren’t obvious, immediately apparent connections between all of them, but Bilal Tanweer slowly and carefully arranges the pieces so that they intersect, even if for a fleeting second. This sort of writing helps to add an extra level of gratification in the reading process.

The Unanswered

Each day I came home brimming with the manic psychic energy of the city, with countless nameless voices in my head, and tried to write it all. But nothing I wrote was up to the task of capturing this ruinously mad city.

The most frustrating thing about the book is the loose threads. There are no attempts to tell us what happened after each character has been shifted aside to make place for another narrative. How does the young boy’s mother react when he reaches home with blood on the car? Does the middle-aged ever manage to reconcile with his son? Does the ambulance driver become better? And more importantly, who is behind the bomb?

But we don’t know. We never find out what happens. And I guess one could argue that that’s not what the story is supposed to be about. In its essence, it’s about that particular moment in time which Bilal Tanweer chooses to show us. We glimpse only a tiny portion of each life, and it is that glimpse that is the purpose of the story.

Insulation was the most important lesson you learned on Karachi’s roads: See as little as possible, hear even less, and touch absolutely nothing.

The Recommendation

The book has a few, immediately noticeable flaws: there are no female narrators, there are huge jumps in between the past and present, and characters appear and disappear randomly from the storytelling. But I didn’t dedicate a whole new heading to these defects because they don’t detract from the overall effect of the story. It is still well-written, there are still things worth discussing, and it remains a book that is worth your time. Recommended.

Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it - not even grieve, because you knew that it would happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow.

*
I review Pakistani Fiction, and talk about Pakistani fiction, and want to talk to people who like to talk about fiction (Pakistani and otherwise, take your pick.) To read this review completely, read more reviews or just contact me so you can talk about books, check out my Blog or follow me on Twitter!

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept was a little too forced and and I'm tired of the linked-stories-make-a-novel trend. The scatter here was too great, indeed, haha. (Did Tanweer attend an American MFA program?) But anyway I was happy to have been exposed to an up-and-coming Pakistani novelist. The title alone is magnificent.

[Noreen Qayam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just finished this book and realized that I'm really not a fan of regional literature, especially that filled with the kind of pseudo-intellectualism our local authors infuse in their books. Perhaps this is a great piece of literature but maybe I'm not yet mature enough to appreciate it.

[Meghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book wrong. I get a short book, I assume it's meant to be read quickly, gulped down like me trying to eat a cookie before my kid notices me doing so and asks to share. This isn't a book that's meant to be gulped. It's a book meant to be savoured, but I doubt you could find anyone who didn't do like me and read the book up as quickly as possible. You can't not - you read and you read and you read and suddenly you're done and you realise because you've blown through this whole thing because you've become addicted to Bilal Tanweer.

What is it about: Intertwined stories about a bomb going off in Karachi. A simplistic sentence that does nothing other than give a framework to the novel. The bomb is there but this isn't a book about a bombing. This isn't a novel with the bomber's point-of-view giving us his reasons or his politics or his religion. For a novel whose central conceit is a terrorist event, it's surprisingly light, almost sparse, rather than being bogged down in accusations or justification for anyone's actions. The bomb is there and the people are there, where the people are a group of family, friends, and neighbours, all tied somehow to the bomb going off at Cantt Station, Karachi, during rush hour. But again, that's too simplified. I don't want to say the novel is intricately constructed because that makes it sound like it's some sort of tricky mystery and I don't want to say that the novel is taut because that makes it sound stressful and I don't want to say exact or precise because that makes it sound like a factual rendering. So I will say, and I mean this in a wondrously complementary way, you can not strip away anything to summarize the novel because Tanweer (I want to call him Bilal and pretend we are friends but I think that might be a little presumptuous of me) has balanced the novel already perfectly on a fulcrum. One less word and we collapse. One more and we tumble down. I can not add anything to describe The Scatter Here is Too Great, nor can I strip words out to give an adequate summary.

The Scatter is Too Great has no manipulation, religious or political. No overt condemnation of ideals, conflicting or matching. There's something really pure and really true about this novel made up of stories. We meet people, they fade out, they reappear as secondary characters in other stories, they come back as protagonists in later ones, they fade away again. And the momentum, as I said earlier, pulls you along to the end when you realise there's more here than you thought, that you should have slowed down, a focused meditation on each word. Nothing is wasted here. Nothing is extraneous. It really, just, simply, works.

Sometimes it's easier to review books I disliked or books with which I had some weird emotional relationship. It's harder to review books that are like a clear ting of a tuning fork, because there is nothing I can write that the book itself doesn't already do better than I could.

It's not a long read. You should go read it.

The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer went on sale August 14th, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Yusra Hanif · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes I read a book and imagine how the author must be like. I try interpreting his sense of humor, the lens he wears to view life in general, his secret fantasies, his favorite ice cream flavor.
Something tells me Bilal Tanweer has no favorite ice cream flavor. Or maybe I am just projecting my persona onto him. But he comes across as a mildly pessimistic person. One for whom life is viewed with dark-tinted lens. Then again, maybe my prejudices come into way and I am calling a realist as a pessimist.
When I first opened the book around 7 months back sitting in the airport lounge, I was rather excited. However for some unknown reason I could hardly read the first few pages and closed it making a mental note to come back to the book. It had a very psuedo- Kamila shamsie flavor to it and despite her being one of my favorite writers, I was expecting something different.
Several months later I picked up the book and managed to read it. I will be honest here that nowhere in the book was I really tempted to know what’s next. It failed to engage me.
Having said that, Karachi is exactly how bilal tanweer describes it as. And a lot more.
I love the way he has depicted snapshots of unfinished stories where emotions sometimes collide head –on with the harsh practical realities and sometimes step aside without a whimper. I was mesmerized by his artistry in weaving an intricate web of stories around a common central focus point- a bomb blast and how in that very explosion so many stories came to an abrupt halt and many new stemmed out.
I was also left charmed by his being able to execute the story on two levels. A time frame level in which the story connects from one generation to another and yet on a parallel level where all these generations exist in the same time frame and converge at a singular point. It is a difficult feat to achieve and the writer must be applauded for it.
I could vividly imagine his description of the patterns on the shattered mirror and could imagine myself tracing my finger across the fault line of Karachi..Wondering where this beautiful chaos will lead to…admiring the symmetry that takes birth from a disaster and either comfortably adjusts to or rather the world around it accommodates it intuitively.
I totally agree with him that the scatter here is too great. Too great to not be romanticized. Too great to be forgotten. Too great to not make any sense of.
I do have a lot of criticism on the plot. While Bilal tries to micro-manage every story, it becomes nearly impossible for him to fit each piece in the bigger canvas leaving a lot to be desired. It’s a debut novel but one would have hoped for the editing to have left the book crispier.
My basic dispute with Bilal Tanweer is his unwillingness to see the joy that nests within enfolds of trajedy in this city. The resilience which sparks and laughs and dances in face of all that is bent upon suffocating and killing it. It is wild and lively. I have seen it.
Somewhere in the lines, the same hope does sparks through. But it does not lingers on. Nothing brings a smile on your face.
I have lived in this city for the past 10 years and my simple observation is that Karachi lives by the motto of “ Live or die trying”. Here hope and despair climb on to a see-saw and giggle and play together. Here life and death are not antonyms but sisters who fight with each other constantly but still cant live without each other.
So if we mention the despondency, the frustration, the unpredictability of life and how lives of the city-dwellers converge on and change afterward a blast, we must also acknowledge that amidst all this mayhem and scatter, there is hope and a certain charming naivety. I just hoped Bilal Tanweer had weaved that in his story too.

[Sukanto · Rating 4 out of 5]

The scatter, the fragments and the shards. There are stories and there are trajectories they take. But all seem to have an epicenter - a bomb blast in Pakistan in this brilliant debut of a novel by Bilal Tanweer. A comparatively short but very intense read, Tanweer sketches his characters with a pathos that is in and well as out of the ordinary. This is a style of narration that I have always enjoyed - non linear yet gripping. Leaves you breathless in a different sort of way maybe but it does.

[Mehrunnisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a book for those who live in cities which often bush the boundaries of patience, acceptance and love. one of the number of characters in the book says about karachi - 'we must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. you must always love the city.'

[Melinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Affecting collection of a chain of short stories linking a city and its people after a bomb blast. Extremely powerful in its depiction of violence and how it impacts peoples lives. Karachi and its inhabitants are explored, you understand the city's heartbeat and what makes its people tick. Story's delving into family roots, father-son relationships,

Karachi a vibrant city with a pulse where its population desperately seeks calm pre and post bomb blast. Both city and people forever hopeful, eyes on a bright sensical future.

Powerful interrelated moving collection of shorts. Every story knots the next story creating a necklace of poignancy. Terror and violence the core but individually the story's are rich and tactile. Wonderful debut from a strong author, kudos to Tanweer.

"Ever seen a bullet-smashed windscreen?
The hole at the center becomes an eye. You see less through it but you gain focus, sharpness. That's how it is-our wounds become our eyes.
Seeing outside becomes seeing outside.
Listen."

A copy was provided in exchange for an honest review

[Parvathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intense. A set of loosely connected characters and their stories all come together around a bomb blast in a Karachi station. The stories are more fragments of the characters' lives than full-blown narratives, but together they form a mosaic of a city - gritty and violence-torn, yet filled with a fierce humanity common to so many South Asian cities. Bilal Tanweer creates a new format for a novel - and we discover a new Pakistani voice.

[Momina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow.....

[Moushine Zahr · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author wrote short stories about parts of the lives of some characters, who were either inside or outside a bus when an explosion occurred in the main Bus station in Karachi. While at first glance these short stories and characters seem to be unrelated, they're actually linked to each other.

Half of these stories are about the same family. Each about one member of that family narrated from a certain perspective. Other stories are linked to it. The author chose a complicated way to tell this story. It's quite difficult to understand. I certainly can't say what the main subject of all these stories are about or whether there is an overall common theme.

I'm just speculating that maybe the author tried to tell readers that despite the daily violence of life and of a city, life goes on as love continues. People need to still see the small signs of love whether such as love of a father for his son, love of his son for his father, brotherly love and love between boy and a girl....

[Hamza Usman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short book of stories that vaguely interconnect, with some lovely insights on Karachi and its many layers. I’m sure there’s a lot to pick up on rereads and string together these disparate narratives.
I particularly liked the two sides of the story of the child whose elder sister is seeing the upstairs neighbor, and his story in turn of being a recovery agent/gangster.
I withhold more scathing thoughts out of some semblance of kinship with this LUMS professor and Pakistani author, for whom I have an abundance of empathy. 3 stars is generous here.

[Aayan Mirza · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The scatter here is too great' is too bloody great. From start to end, never a dull moment. Loved each and every word.

[Zainab Salman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The scatter in this book was indeed too great.

[Lex]

very weird in terms of structure, idk how I feel about it. I wrote about it for class and talked about how overtly Freudian everything was and my prof said “I’m friends with the author and I know he doesn’t read Freud” so what’s that about

[Billz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will definitely have to read this a second time to make full sense of the novel, but I still really liked it. The Writer in The City section at the end was my favorite. I can’t write either, yet it is desperately the only thing I want to do.

[Tripfiction · Rating 5 out of 5]

Novel set in Karachi

This is a very impressive book. Bilal Tanweer was born and raised in Karachi… and it shows. The city comes through on every page of the book – the filth, the mass of humanity, the constant traffic jams, the charm of many of its people – and the nastiness of others. You really feel you are there from the garbage strewn beach at Sea View to the throbbing streets of the markets. Hard to believe that this is his first book.

The link in the narrative is a bomb blast at Cantt Station that kills and maims many. There are several interrelated short stories that revolve around this event. The stories appear disjointed until you realise that a character from one suddenly appears in another to make a whole picture from a different angle. And the characters are a cross section of Karachi’s population. They range from Comrade Sukhansaz, an ex-communist and poet being picked on on a bus by kids, to a teenager who steals his mother’s car to meet his girlfriend, to a boy who is bullied at school, and to Asma, a girl who tells her young brother stories to hide her sadness within. Plus Sadeq, a boy who is paid to re-possess cars where payments are in default (quasi legal) and a successful businessman. And Akbar, an ambulance man who attended the blast and suffered enormous emotional and mental damage. A real coming together of those that make up the city’s society.

The individual stories and their timelines are at times a little confusing. We move rapidly from two friends bunking off school to their relationship decades later, and seamlessly across different generations of the same family. But I suspect this is intentional. Tanweer likens the blast at the station to a bullet through a windscreen, where a clean hole is surrounded by a mosaic of cracked glass that is hard to format and make sense of. It is not easy to tie it all together, and back to the event itself. I suspect the different stories and timelines to be the cracked mosaic around the blast – actually they are linked, but it is not entirely obvious how to the casual observer. The notion of cracked glass has produced a fabulous, and eye catching cover for this book.

Tanweer loves the city and its people. The people he writes about are real (if flawed…) and Karachi is absolutely at the heart of the book. It is a vibrant and challenging portrayal of the place and its inhabitants. People are generally upbeat and optimistic despite the conditions in which they exist. And, as I said at the beginning, you really feel you are there and taking part. Karachi is not a city I have visited, but I now feel I have a (no doubt naïve) understanding of at least parts of it.

A book I would recommend you to read – whether, or not, you intend to head for Pakistan.

[Wasio Abbasi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book with some excellent prose and vivid imagination. It's a collection of short stories, spanning three generations and with various viewpoints. Some are linked with a certain bomb blast at Cantt Station, others linked with characters that we come across in the stories.
Although I strongly admire the way Bilal has described various stories from various point of views, supremely diversified personalities and lifestyles that feel genuinely authentic, the reason I have given it three stars is the jumping nature of the story. As a reader I am unable to maintain my focus as it is broken with sudden beginning of a new story, often from a character from a different time altogether. This break of concentration is worse than reading a regular collection of short stories because the ending of each story is rather sudden, the other story is directly or indirectly linked and not altogether something else and most of all, in the end it starts to feel the same. You feel as if the characters want to keep themselves in a vicious cycle of self-pity for the pretty-much-worthless lives they live. It is understandable that stories about Karachi cannot ignore the violent nature of the city nor its gloomy reality, a fact quite thoroughly explored in this novel, but having a gloomy event with several short stories from characters points of views that are equally troubled and with miserable lives ... the novel overall casts a gloomy spell on you especially if you read it completely in one or two readings. Even the very thoughtful ending story does little to offer any respite when you finally reach the end.
On the whole this was a good effort by Bilal and a good experiment as well, even if it didn't had the desired result.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Scatter Here is Too Great is a most impressive debut from its Pakistani author, Bilal Tanweer. Innovative in form, and haunting in its theme, this novel held my attention from start to finish.

As you can see from the cover, the central image of the book is a bullet-shattered windscreen:


The hole at the centre throws a sharp clean web around itself and becomes crowded with tiny crystals. That’s a metaphor for my world, this city: broken, beautiful, and born of tremendous violence.

One way to give you this account is to ‘name the streets and number the dead.’ Another is to give you this scatter I have gathered to make sense of things, go beyond appearances, read the crystal design on the broken screen.

My mind is a stiff skein of voices. I will yank out the threads and find the edges.

Listen.

In fragments, through the voices of Tanweer’s narrators, we learn the stories behind a bomb-blast in the city of Karachi, in Pakistan. The first voice is childish: a boy explodes into fisticuffs when he is teased once too often – but his family and school are more concerned about his swearing than they are about him beating up another boy. His ambition is to become a fighter pilot and fight India. Violence is commonplace beneath a veneer of religious respectability.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/01/09/th...

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s some good writing here, and I think I see what the author was trying to achieve with his scattered approach to his narrative, but that very scattered approach made it hard for me to engage with the characters, or indeed find my way into the story. Not really a novel, it’s a series of interconnected short stories or vignettes about a disparate group of characters, a cross-section of Karachi’s inhabitants, all of whom are united in some way by a bomb blast at the bus station. In fact the individual stories could be read in any order, as Tanweer doesn’t take a chronological approach, but for me this made it all rather confusing. As a portrait of Karachi itself I enjoyed it rather more. Atmospheric, hot, crowded and with a constant undercurrent of violence, the city itself came alive in a way some of the characters did not. However, a couple of the stories in particular were very good indeed and I look forward to reading more from this début author as he has a way with words and descriptions that I might well enjoy more in another context.

[Fia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tanveer has proved his title completely..

first as most of the novel/ stories are truly scattered...

and second after the readers get through it completely ...
then their mind becomes an example of "the scatter here is too great"*pointing towards your mind* (completely confused).

third the plot at times shows three scattered blasts in three scattered times and places where as Bilal Tanveer says its just one..(i'm all scattered mentally)
*being a researcher on Karachi, i read it thrice to confirm but always found myself confused in the number of blasts*
and come on Karachi is much more than just blasts... go and ask the residents...!!

fourth having an optimist vision of life i kept looking for any optimistic vision through the novel... but why is that Bilal chose a novel on negative theme to begin his career...

i wish his next work to be a bit more towards positive side and less scattered.

all the best wishes to BILAL TANVEER..:)

[Maryam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was toying with the idea of writing something for The Scatter when I came across Marbles' review (don't know how to link his profile here). It articulates exactly what I felt and wanted to say. Following is the part I agree with the most:

"As a whole, the book fell short of my expectations. Some portions of the stories make for an interesting read in an otherwise rather lacking-in-depth collection of tales that failed to pique my interest.

The circumstantial similarities between a few characters (i.e; their alienation with their fathers) left me rather confused half way through the book as to which character’s story I was actually reading."

Exactly. I had no idea which character's story I was reading at which part. Very confusing.

[Indiabookstore · Rating 3 out of 5]

The boy who learns new swear words, the boyfriend who misses his ex, the girl who is taunted because she sullied her family’s name, the communist grandfather who believes that his former glory will be restored, are just a few among the stories of the book. All the stories are interconnected somewhere, and the loose ends are beautifully tied up at the end.Read full review.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Life is made of stories, fragments of life". I felt the book was made of fragments, hard to connect and follow. Understandably everything was focused around the bombing in the station, yet it was difficult to find their significance to each other. Parts of the story didn't seem to resolve for me.

[Razzaq · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writer makes every possible attempt to make his characters seem fragile, oppressed and warred upon by the terrorism and corruption infested reality of everyday Pakistan and though some stories do come close to representing the injustice, mostly they turn out to be flaky and sometimes annoyingly pretentious. A disappointing debut.