Figures of Enchantment

by Zulfikar Ghose

No matter how many times he did his sums, Filipe Gamboa’s salary never amounted to his daydream. He would always want more than he possessed. He longed for a great fortune not only for a luxury apartment and a Mercedes Benz but also to ensure his daughter, Mariana, had the best possible future with the best possible education. His misfortune is to be passed over at work, and then arrested at a political demonstration. After which he is put in a small boat and abandoned in the ocean . . . But when death seems inevitable, another world beckons. New lives can be swapped for old, and Gamboa on his mysterious island sanctuary can create an illusion that the intervening years have not passed, and that his idea of the past is merely a foreknowledge of the future. With poetic insight and surreal logic Zulfikar Ghose depicts a universe where individuals are inextricably bound by the perversities of fate, able only to dream escape.

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Zulfikar Ghose (born in Sialkot, India (now Pakistan) on March 13, 1935) is a novelist, poet and essayist. A native of Pakistan who has long lived in Texas, he writes in the surrealist mode of much Latin American fiction, blending fantasy and harsh realism.

He became a close friend of British experimental writer B. S. Johnson, with whom he collaborated on several projects, and of Anthony Smith. The three writers met when they served as joint editors of an annual anthology of student poets called Universities' Poetry. Ghose also met English poet Ted Hughes and his wife, the American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, and American author Janet Burroway, with whom he occasionally collaborated.
While teaching and writing in London from 1963–1969, Ghose also free-lanced as a sports journalist, reporting on cricket for The Observer newspaper. Two collections of his poetry were published, The Loss of India (1964) and Jets From Orange (1967), along with an autobiography called Confessions of a Native-Alien (1965) and his first two novels, The Contradictions (1966) and The Murder of Aziz Khan (1969). The Contradictions explores differences between Western and Eastern attitudes and ways of life.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

For fans of Sisyphean misery rendered in lyrical, compassionate, and insightful prose: welcome to the world of buried author Zulfikar Ghose. Set in an unstated South American nation (Brazil the likeliest candidate), Figures of Enchantment depicts the repetitive lives of predetermined struggle and unhappiness of a cast of working-class no-hopers whose dreams are depicted at length and tortured into retreat so the characters can focus on the real work of life—forever staring into oblivion. Gamboa is an office drudge who finds himself exiled to a remote island where he is forced to start a second life of different drudgery, Mariana is a peasant girl whose mother goes mad and is destined to scrub floors and become pregnant by a series of undesirable slobs, and Frederico is luckier in that he is allowed several months sleeping with a beautiful (but older and overweight) rich woman before beginning his life of prostitution. These tales are narrated in a sublime storytelling voice, and interlinked with skill over five long chapters. Ghose is never melodramatic, although his refusal to introduce a note of hope into his stories and depiction of most people as evil-minded greed-driven wretches makes them difficult to read without deep feelings of depression—then again: this is unflinching (sometimes magical) realism. It does take a lot of chutzpah to write about slum life with such detail and insight when no one else cares—so three cheers, and a few stiff ones, for the work of Mr. Ghose.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!