Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

 The universe is shaking as Hedayat, the "glossolalist" narrator of Fire in the Unnameable Country is born on a flying carpet in the skies above an obscure land whose leader has manufactured the ability to hear every unspoken utterance of the nation. He records the contents of his citizens' minds onto tape reels for archival storage. Later in Hedayat's young life, as the unnameable country collapses into disarray around him, he begins an epistle, wherein, interspersed with accounts of contemporary terrorist attacks and the outbreak of a mysterious viral epidemic, he invokes the memories of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to revisit the troubled country's history and expose the roots of its crisis. Hedayat's dark world is entirely foreign but oddly familiar, echoing the banality of our daily diversions and adding a terrifying twist. The Mirror, a gruesome, never-ending reality show, turns the city of La Maga into a permanent Hollywood-style film set where people gamble body parts and live in fear of the Black Organs, the paramilitary manifestation of the eviscerators that threaten to infect the nation. Islam's vibrant, ingenious construction sends the plot twisting down rabbit holes and caterwauling through secret doorways to emerge anywhere from a domestic living room to a bomb technician's workshop to the deep recesses of the state's repressive political apparatus. An utterly remarkable debut, filled with original characters caught up in wonderfully imaginative circumstances and rendered in uniquely inventive language, Fire in the Unnameable Country is a book like no other.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 2014

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really impressive given that it's a debut novel by a writer in his 30s. The most obvious influence is the magical realism of the latin american boom writers, but if you pay attention to the digressive story telling and playing with language you can pick up influence from the Rabelais/Stearne tradition as well. He likes to play around with syntax and use non English words, but despite what a lot of the other reviews here say the book isn't really that hard to follow, just fairly dense. It's also very political, with a lot of time spent on western imperialism, surveillance culture, and so on.

[Krista · Rating 2 out of 5]

True to its name and as is clear to see, our country possesses an unfathomable geography. Unfathomable geography be damned, the unnameable country must be real because they're working invincible roundtheclock to invent it, depriving limbs lips ears, horsewhipping furiously for dream of curving and straight streets, edifices, architecture, yes, but also geography, whole rivers dammed and forded, pits dug, perished workers thrown into: let them cry out in joy, Quincy would yell, let them realize their place is here and nowhere else, planting spiders, cultivating webs, harvesting thread for wear or garrison.

I kept falling asleep while reading Fire in the Unnameable Country; I honestly couldn't get through more than 20 pages of it before my eyelids started drooping. And it's not because it's boring exactly, but with precisely zero science to back me up, I think that this book -- with its quasi-invented language and choppy style -- was engaging (and exhausting) a different part of my brain than what I ordinarily use for reading.

Recall, though I have yet to tell you…this book includes: thoughtreels; spidersilk; The Mirror; Black Organs; young men who handle raisins or blow pepper or eat raw onions like apples in order to connect with their creativity; young women who read thoughts on shortwave radios or loom hosiery or feed blood to dying ghosts; and a higgledy-piggledy overview of one man's genealogy -- and the lamentable history of the unnameable country in which he lives -- told by a character with glossolalia (someone who also happened to gestate in his mother's womb for 8 1/2 years and was finally born on a flying carpet).

I read this book based on this article (which I only skimmed to avoid spoilers), but reading it now, it explains Ghalib Islam's process and intent for Fire in the Unnameable Country so I won't repeat it here. I do think, however, that he put some clues into this book like:

he is not a political man, but a writer in the style of certain modernists for whom poetry is a description of the effects of war on language.

And:

let us no longer delay the inevitable…now that you realize the author was only designing another hoop-and-fire game for you to play, to jump through for his entertainment.

On this book's cover, Margaret Atwood invokes Calvino and Burroughs, but I was able to read If On a Winter's Night A Traveler and Naked Lunch without falling asleep -- this style is wholly the author's own. And it's interesting that it's Atwood on the cover -- according to that article cited above, she served as Islam's mentor during the writing of this book, which likely explains the many anti-American passages, like:

No, we could not love the Americans because they had imprisoned us with mirror-streets and spied on us with everywhere cameras of a counterfeit movie set; they had burned us with a deceptive phosphorescent fire, which resisted water, and had deprived us of the ability to earn an honest living and driven us to hidden organs of income.

This review is a favourable one that does a good job of explaining the art of Islam's effort and this review sums up my own reading experience:

Fire in the Unnameable Country is yet another of these wow-filled books by wildly ambitious, wildly talented new writers that are impressive to hear about as literary constructions but not especially enjoyable to read as actual novels. Islam has a lot to say, perhaps too much in this vertiginous first effort.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most exciting to read books I have ever read. Convention is tipped on it's ear with this one, causing one to 'reteach' themselves how to 'read' between the lines - more like loops and swirls - in order to uncover the multitude of layers, allowing for characterization to slowly build to a slow burn. It took me far longer to read than first anticipated but it wasn't out of frustration - more to the fact that the endless barrage of words left me satiated time and again to the point that I needed to have time to digest what I had read. I am most eager to see what Mr. Islam's next venture will present itself as. Thank you for reaffirming my belief that the 'novel' must constantly reinvent itself to remain topical!

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't even know where to begin with discussing this brilliant, difficult, multivocal novel. Luckily, some much smarter people have already done it for me.

(NB I started reading this back in late 2014, with the aim of taking part in the Strange Horizons book club discussion, but had neither the time nor the brain space back then; I returned to it last week, and zoomed through it. But it still makes my head hurt. In the best way.)

[Jay-san · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book takes postmodernism to the next level in terms of style and content. The themes are eclectic and boldly interwoven. Reader beware: patience is necessary for this book's style; a solid understanding of commerce and deconstructive lit theory is necessary to make the read worthwhile and enjoyable.

[Matt Mctaggart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Epic free verse: collection of reflections on identity, memory, freedom, love, death, etc seemingly cut and reassembled from intercepted thoughts.
A difficult, vital, and ultimately rewarding read.

[Sabrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Singular, bizarre, dizzying.

Glossolalia. What is glossolalia and what do they say of glossolalia. You may know it as panting keening raise-the-roof kind of God talk, but my automatic tongue was different. I didn't pray for glossolalia and I fasted because I was hungry, as disobedient children do when they can't find what they want to eat. And though I'd like to eschew all presence of the characteristic diagnostic signals church fever flushed face and tears observable in the few Pentecostal establishments in our unnameable country, I must recall that my father found me one day flapping arms in T-shirt, arms with budding vanes barbs barbules, stirring the fetid air in my room with hairy forearms that looked like feathered wings, muttering the story of once upon a time a father imprisoned his son in a wardrobe.

Who are you talking to, I heard a voice behind me and turned my neck one hundred eighty degrees wide-eyed right around like an owl to find Mamun Ben Jaloun's astonished face staring at me. From then on, I tried to be quieter about my heedless iterations, but they emerged without warning like Niramish's narcoleptic sleep sessions. I would fly fantastical lines without consideration or worry for surrounding my listeners. I had become a glossolalist, an inexplicable condemnation, lifetime commitment.

[❀༉‧₊˚ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Convoluted drivel. By page 50, it went beyond the point of symbolism into the territory of pure nonsense and went on for the whole 450 pages. It felt as if the author didn't even know what his next sentence would be and didn't care whether or not it connected with any of the previous sentences, and conversely I didn't remember the previous sentence the moment I move onto the next. It got terribly tiring by page 150, and I ended up speed reading the rest of the book, and somehow, it almost made more sense when I was only reading every seventh word. Absolutely dreadful. I am happy to finally be done with it.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

In my over 50 years of reading there have been about four books I've quit reading. Now there are five. Perhaps History will decide Fire in the Unnameable Country is a Great Novel™. But I am not history; perhaps, like History, I have limited time left; and I'm not going to waste any of that remaining time not enjoying the last half of this book.

[Elliot · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because the title was resonant for me, a little more than most others. And the synopsis was equally intriguing.
Reading the goodread reviews post-purchase had me worried that I was in for an experience similar to Finnegan's Wake. But the prose is fully penetrable for those wondering, it just requires a focus and patience, as time will jump around and narrative threads will be abandoned abruptly in favor of others. Characters will pop in with no introduction but such familiarity that you might easily wonder if they've been mentioned before. In this way it's similar to stream-of-consciousness writing, although language and grammar can also be a little more malleable, reflecting the "gift" of the glossolist narrator.

Atwood's blurb refers to the book as a funny satire (among other things) but I'm not sure I would view it as being a ha-ha style of parody. Rather the book seems more akin to straight-forward magical realism and sci-fi, where commentary is more paramount than delivery. One might be tempted to call the book funny however, simply because of how playful the language and structure can be sometimes, nouns becoming verbs ("“whispered Iagian") etc.

It's rare that a book reads so original with a voice entirely its own, and the themes that are developed (or touched upon) are strong in all their presentations. For those virtues I'd be tempted to give it four or five stars. But these virtues feel like passing and not entirely worthwhile pleasures when considering the time spent contemplating its language and structure throughout.

[Tina Rogers · Rating 2 out of 5]

I won this book from goodreads giveaways. I have to give this book 2 stars. Only because they author did make an effort to write a novel. But its just an effort this book gave me a headache reading the first chapter and its very confusing. Nothing makes sense at all it jumps all over the place then back again, with no warning its just the way the book was written. I would rather watch paint dry then to try and finish this book. I'm sorry but I will try to pass this book on and if the next person decides to burn this book well that will be their choice.

[Andrea]

Around the World: Bangladesh

Couldn't do it. This is one of those novels that you would be asked to read in a university literature class and I would have slogged though it and then come to love it after weeks of careful discussion and analysis with classmates and teachers. But without the support of an academic group I couldn't get past the first 50 pages. Too convoluted, too hard to read. The narrative was all over the place and I couldn't get a grip on it. I need a more stable story for the time being.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really couldn’t get into this novel because I found it was all over the place; the plot was just so jumbled and a little confusing.
The author was trying too hard to make an impactful first novel and I feel that he failed (at least for me).
The novel wasn’t all that bad…it did have its moments (and those moments are great). I must admit that Ghalib Islam does have a unique writing style, however I don’t think it’s for me.

[Fábio de Carvalho · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea what Ghalib Islam actually intended to do with that book. Ghalib Islam seems to have forgotten himself after a hundred pages, as he stopped caring for his own narration, for any sense of continuity and for any intended message. A pale copy of Midnight's Children (which is quite something to say considering I found Midnight's Children lackluster.)

[Jenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book from a goodreads giveaway. Initially I found the book hard to get into. The author uses a very unique writing style that takes some effort to follow. Eventually I adapted, and I ended up enjoying the book somewhat. The story was interesting, but boring at times.

[Alok Sarma · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too many thoughts put together in each stories and looks like disconnected. Author assumed the reader must have lots of knowledge on all areas prior to reading this book. Not for common readers.
At end of spending so much time to understand, you don't know what you get out of it.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book very difficult to read and follow.I had a very difficult time keeping my interest in this book.

[Rebecca Fisseha]

Torture.