The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

by H.M. Naqvi

Winner of the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, H.M. Naqvi follows his critically-lauded debut Home Boy with The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, an enthralling novel about one unforgettable and gloriously unaccomplished man, his impending death, and the history and life of his bustling, shape-shifting city.

Abdullah, bachelor and scion of a once prominent family, awakes on the morning of his seventieth birthday and considers launching himself over the balcony. Having spent years attempting to compile a "mythopoetic legacy" of his beloved Karachi, the cosmopolitan heart of Pakistan, Abdullah has lost his zeal. A surprise invitation for a night out from his old friend Felix Pinto snaps Abdullah out of his funk, and saddles him with a ward—Pinto's adolescent grandson Bosco. As Abdullah plays mentor to Bosco, he also attracts the romantic attentions of Jugnu, an enigmatic siren with links to the mob. All the while Abdullah's brothers' plot to evict him from the family estate. Now he must to try to save his home—or face losing his last connection to his familial past.

Anarchic, erudite, and rollicking, with a septuagenarian protagonist like no other, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is a joyride of a story set against a kaleidoscopic portrait of one of the world's most vibrant cities.

Genres: Fiction, Pakistan, Asia, Literature, Literary Fiction

284 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

H. M. NAQVI is a graduate of Georgetown and the creative writing program at Boston University. He won the Phelam Prize for poetry and represented Pakistan at the National Poetry Slam in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In recent years, he taught creative writing at B.U., and presently divides his time between Karachi and the U.S. East Coast.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down to 3 stars
This a story of a 70 year old lifelong bachelor in Karachi, Pakistan who is beset by relatives who conspire to eject him from his home. At the same time he somewhat unexpectedly becomes a temporary guardian of Bosco, his old friend's grandson. Felix Pinto is a jazz trumpeter and friend of Abdullah for decades. Abdullah also becomes infatuated with Jungu, a lover of a gangster now in prison.

Pros: There are numerous and amusing comments on the history and the culture of the city, the South Asian sub continent and the world.
Cons: The ending was a letdown and somewhat confusing.
Some quotes:
Alliteration: "It is a downpour of self-pity, a veritable monsoon of misery..."
Jazz trumpeter: "What follows is an awesome rendition of Take Five, more Puente than Brubeck, more marching band perhaps than Jazz."
History: "...but since the storied Enlightenment and subsequent Colonial Conquests--the former strangely informing the latter--the Caucasian tribes have broadly believed that history is a chronicle of progress.
The Chinese, on the other hand, have always maintained that History is Cyclical."
Thanks to Grove Atlantic for sending me this eARC through NetGalley.

[Anum Shaharyar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh god, who let H. M. Naqvi publish another book? This is going to be a disaster. I'm so totally here for it.

[Anna Baillie-Karas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rich, playful novel set in Karachi. Abdullah traverses the city with grandson Bosco, on a mission to save his family empire, along the way falling for trans woman Jugnu. Expressive, textured prose. The writing has great rhythm & energy. Intricate sentences bring to life the joy & chaos of his family & city. Naqvi coveys serious observations about Karachi, religion & philosophical musings with humour & irreverence. Original & fun.

[Carol Kean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly, I have to confess this is a DNF - could not finish.

The prose is brilliant, to be sure. And the reader has to be brilliant, or at least very alert and quick, to keep up with the narrator and his footnotes, at least one for every page. On the one hand, I totally identify with this busy mind (dare I call it an ADHD mind like mine?), because I get derailed by my own thoughts on the rare occasion I have an audience and someone is listening to me as I speak. Tangents tempt me before the end of every sentence. The urge to provide backstory and context and "that reminds me, he also did this..."

Following the text of this novel, however, was just exhausting. With Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, the payoff is more immediate. I love that gossipy narrator who grouses about the K family without a single footnote.

I also love-hate the self-aggrandizing narrator of Lolita, Humbert Humbert.

But this one not only wears me out, he has me wincing and cringing. This old man rises in his bathrobe which falls open in public, exposing more than I want to see even as a reader spared the actual spectacle. Others will find this hilarious, I know. Honest, I do have a sense of humor. But hairy balls on a doddering old man don't do it for me.

If you can slog through the pages, there's a relationship between the old man and the young man helping to tell this tale, and the final page is poignant. Once I skimmed and skipped to that point, I no longer felt a need to work my way so arduously through the footnotes and anecdote to get there.

Clever writing, fresh and original, but I have this obsession with Cossacks, and seeing one suffer the infirmities of old age just wasn't what I needed. Maybe a year from now I'll return to it and love it (yes, this happens to me with books I had to set aside), but for now, I'm in a mood for grandeur and nostalgia and triumph, not vicissitudes.instead of victories.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abdullah is a gentleman and a scholar. Unfortunately, no one in his family seems to recognize his talents and it’s hard to fund his lifestyle on the income from a small garment dyeing company (after it’s been skimmed by the manager). All Abdullah has is his stake in the family house, his books, his carefully cultivated habits, and a ragtag pack of friends who have seen better days. In The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, by H.M. Naqvi, we witness the great man’s last stand against incivility and the passing of an age...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.

[Sonali Dabade · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would have been so much better if the footnotes had been included within the story itself. They are very annoying and takes away your attention from the story. Not to forget that the story makes sense and is rather poignant in parts, but put it together and it becomes a hotch-potch of things that don't make sense at all!

[Sheherbano Husain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended! A beautifully written, nuanced and engaging novel - I would liken it to a delicious layered cake; the footnotes are like nuts, raisins and fruits, that add more notes, texture and flavour to the multiple layers and if that’s not your thing, you can enjoy the cake on its own!

[Afia Aslam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a difficult read (at least in the beginning), but I believe this is a novel that deserves the reader's attention and patience. HM Naqvi has penned an incredible ode to Karachi, and Abdullah the Cossack is a triumph of a character. I wish he existed in real life.

I would give this a 4.5 (wish we had the option in Good Reads).

[Zainab Zainabjan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i'm thoroughly enjoying this book; at times i'm even laughing out loud. HMN has written it in a completely original style and has me captivated.
HMN deserves another prize!

[Tiffany Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written. This book will have you covering almost every emotion from sad to funny. I enjoyed the writing style and the story was well written. I would recommend this book.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Naqvi's sophomore effort doesn't really deliver. Here, the titular Abdullah, the Pakistani reincarnation of Ignatius Reilly, is kind of trying to save his home from being sold out from under him while kind of taking care of a jazz trumpeter's grandson while kind of starting a relationship with a woman while kind of writing the Mythopoetic Legacy of Abdullah Shah Ghazi (RA) (patron saint of Karachi). All of this can be learned by reading the jacket copy. After finishing the book, the reader sees Naqvi employing a clever frame narrative that takes some effort to decode, and allows that the pages in hand could be the oft-mentioned and ne'er-seen Mythopoetic Legacy Abdullah claims to be working on, making the whole novel a meta-textual expression of that legacy (which would be cool, but no part of the novel actually suggests this reading). Now, the all-purpose critique - that an artwork is "uneven" - is so frequently employed that it's become a cliche. Such a critique is too vague, too superficial to really mean anything, to really address what about a painting or a film or a novel is and isn't working. Like remarking on a text's flow, calling something uneven signals the laziness of the critic more than the failure of the artist. The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is uneven. Naqvi has written two novels now, and both of them are representations of a wildly pyrotechnic style whereby he smashes together haute-theory erudition and the hard-won gabble of American and British and Pakistani (Punjabi) slang (to say nothing of loan words from, like, a half dozen other (mostly South Asian) languages) into lines that fashion the difficult and the familiar and the deictic into beautiful prose. This is what I came back to him for and what I think he doesn't get enough credit for in Home Boy. His use of language is super creative and super fun and reminds you of how versatile English is and encourages you to be more creative and fun and versatile yourself. But the narrative here never gets off the ground. Each plotline, instead of complementing, competes with the others, dampening rather than amplifying the text's momentum. Instead of building tension by adding to the protag.'s problems, I found the whole of my pathos being cut into smaller pieces, leaving me apathetic to what becomes of Abdullah et al. What happens with the house? What happens with Bosco? What happens with Jugnu? I kind of don't care. This is what I mean by uneven; the prose style is great and the story goes nowhere. I can accept that I wasn't the right reader for this book, that it's merits were lost on me and that I'm culturally illiterate. But, at the end of the whole everything, I came in wanting to like this book, and kind of don't.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naqvi's prose is brilliant and his main character is larger than life. I had a little trouble getting oriented in the first 20 pages, in which he sets Abdullah's scene in Cuarachee (Karachi), Pakistan, along with a sketch of his family, some of whom are plotting to evict him from the family home. But the story picks up after that and is by turns funny and riveting. One of the back-cover blurbs describes Abdullah as a Pakistani Falstaff, but I think that sells him short. He is a very kind and very smart autodidact, but much limited by a 70-year-old body that he has not taken care of, so his good intentions and growing courage are often challenged by his physical stamina and disabilities. He also often runs into trouble for not being sufficiently devout in the whirlwind of various religions observances in Karachi, and he falls deeply in love with a stranger who rescues him from an imminent beating in the marketplace. In fact, his religion is kindness, literature, the mythopoetic legend he is writing of the local saint, and the fondness and care he extends to his nephews and his unexpected new ward Bosco, the grandson of an old friend. His writings are peppered with footnotes but readers are warned in the beginning that they can skip them. (I read the ones that were in English. Some were interesting and helpful in understanding the culture and background; others not.)

[Samir · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a tough one. It's a very clever and amusing book and HM can write the most beautiful prose. But the book just didn't grab me, I almost abandoned it several times. The narrator, Abdullah, is an aging Karachite (Currachee he calls it), learned and intelligent and a bit of a good for nothing in conventional worldly terms. He has his memories and philosophical ruminations on the city and the family - both of which have seen better times. Also has thoughts on virtually everything else under the sun, some wise, mostly whimsical. Virtually every page has footnotes (rare in fiction) where Abdullah expands on various matters. I really liked HM's first book, Home Boy, immensely. This one disappoints. Not sure how he fails with this book - it's a bit self indulgent, written for himself perhaps?

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had such high hopes for this story. I thought it might be a book in translation, but learned it's author, though Pakistani, was also educated in the US and also worked at various colleges. Anyway, at the very least I was hoping it might be similar to The Secret Diary Of Hendrik Groen, but alas, no, not entertaining to me. The book wasn't a reminisce of an old man after a long life, but more of a let's get the old guy all revved up and miserable. Poor old guy justs wants to live his life and write the forgotten history of his good old days. Then there were the footnotes. So many of them! It was like reading a txt book and exhausting after a bit. I am sure there are many who will enjoy this twisty tale. And I may come back to it in time....just not now.

I received a Kindle arc from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.

[Saadia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book and I hope I have the patience to pick it up again and see it from new eyes. But at this time I could not finish it.
The prose is overloaded with the self-orientalisation of "kurrachee" or whatever the author wants to call the city and nostalgia for the boozy past of jazz clubs and cinemas. It seems the effort has been in turn of phrase rather than moving the story forward or making clear important plot points. The footnotes are further distractions and break up the flow of the story for the reader. I constantly felt I was reading something tangential to the actual story the writer wanted to tell.

[Kathleen Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried, really I did, to read this but found myself confounded and defeated, giving up at about the 50 percent point. Abdullah is a 70 year old man with a passel of ungrateful relatives. He's lived a big vivid life and that isn't changing any time soon. There are a lot of words in this tale and footnotes- and I hate footnotes with a passion as, at least for me, they disrupt the flow of both the narrative and my thoughts. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. I suspect I'll be the odd critic out on this one.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slightly absurd, frequently farcical, always engaging--the title character leads us through tiny bits of the history of Karachi in his 70th year. He loves Sarah Vaughan and Boney M's ode to Rasputin and clearly does not represent the typical Karachi resident. The author thoughtfully provides a glossary (which contains jokes too), and I highly recommend the occasional dip into Google for those confused as I about, for instance, the holiday of Urs. You needn't read the footnotes if they annoy you, but I enjoyed them.

[Raheel · Rating 4 out of 5]

- Rich with the culture, history, and personalities of Karachi
- Borders the line of being pretentious with language; but mostly the flourishes are in the right places.
- very humorous

You feel the author's personality come through Abdullah: a liberal, non-practicing Muslim man lamenting his city's fall and the practicing Muslim, but celebrating the diversity around him.

[Salman Ahsan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Naqvi is a wordsmith and his skill shows through his use of archaic prose to evoke a sense of nostalgia. But he carries that a little too far, making his references so arcane that it turns reading this book into a chore. It is quite possible, though, that people familiar with Karachi, particularly with the era that the protagonist hails from, will find this book far more interesting than I did.

[Cherise Wolas]

I read and reviewed The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack for The Shortlist for the New York Times Book Review.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/bo...

[Zertab Quaderi · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could, I would have given it all the stars in the Universe! Full of energy, wit, and historical, music, cultural, and literary references, this novel drives some serious home truths in the most non-serious way! The best book I've read this year.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never judge a book by its title. Based on the title I thought I was going to read a very different book, therefore I was a bit disappointed when I first started reading it. However, once I got over my selfish disappointment, I found this to be a really wonderful read. A keeper.

[Polly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish.

Hard work to read, no plot happening within the first 1/3 of the book - the point at which I gave up. The footnotes are annoying and make the reading experience very disjointed.

[Mehrukh Nasim · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Sadiq Kazi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eminently forgettable!

[Amina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story was.. actually there wasnt much of a story

[Ken Kamer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but verbose, a lot of footnotes
Pakistani character

[Karen]

Read to page 15, but the cutesy style just didn’t appeal to me, so DNF.

[Arjanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried twice but the story of there is, is hard to follow.

[Muhammad Abu Bakar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book a few years ago. It had me chuckling with delight. The main character is a colorful personality, and I found his musings and idiosyncrasies to be very entertaining.
A few things which I can still recall about this book (in no particular order) include that his brother kidnaps him towards the end of the book. He makes his own compost. Dislikes cats. One thing I found very funny was when he wakes up one morning, and outside it is very foggy, so he compares himself to as a poet looking for inspiration. His catchphrase "What the Dickens" had me howling with laughter. Refers to kids as "childoos".
The book is sprinkled with fun facts about Karachi (Or as he would pronounce it "Kurraachee").
It does have lengthy footnotes however. But, overall a very fun book which I would recommend to anyone wanting to read something from a Pakistani writer.