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Absurd Night: A Novel
A severed hand is discovered floating in a river, one that appears magically intact eliciting varied emotions from those who encounter it. A witty and devastating novella which presents rural Bangladesh in a deceptively simple light, Manzoorul Islam paints a picture of communities coming to terms with times as changeable and as destructive as Bangladesh's many seasons.
156 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Syed Manzoorul Islam
43 books23 followersSyed Manzoorul Islam (18 January 1951 – 10 October 2025) was a Bangladeshi critic, writer, and a professor at the University of Dhaka. As a literary critic, he wrote criticism on writers including Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sudhindranath Dutta, Samar Sen, and Shamsur Rahman. He became the president of PEN Bangladesh in January 2018.
Islam won Ekushey Padak in 2018 in the language and literature category. Earlier, he received a Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1996, and his 2005 short stories collection Prem o Prarthanar Galpo was Prothom Alo's book of the year.
Islam was born in Sylhet to Syed Amirul Islam and Rabeya Khatun. He passed the entrance examination from Sylhet Government Pilot High School in 1966 and Intermediate examination from Sylhet MC College in 1968. He received his graduate and post-graduate degree from the University of Dhaka respectively in 1971 and 1972. Later he went to Canada and earned a PhD from Queen's University at Kingston in 1981 for his thesis on the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg’s philosophy in the poetry of W. B. Yeats. In 1989, he went to the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg as a Fulbright Scholar and taught there one semester. He retired from the faculty position at the University of Dhaka and joined University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
Islam died from complications of a heart attack on 10 October 2025, at the age of 74.
Islam won Ekushey Padak in 2018 in the language and literature category. Earlier, he received a Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1996, and his 2005 short stories collection Prem o Prarthanar Galpo was Prothom Alo's book of the year.
Islam was born in Sylhet to Syed Amirul Islam and Rabeya Khatun. He passed the entrance examination from Sylhet Government Pilot High School in 1966 and Intermediate examination from Sylhet MC College in 1968. He received his graduate and post-graduate degree from the University of Dhaka respectively in 1971 and 1972. Later he went to Canada and earned a PhD from Queen's University at Kingston in 1981 for his thesis on the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg’s philosophy in the poetry of W. B. Yeats. In 1989, he went to the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg as a Fulbright Scholar and taught there one semester. He retired from the faculty position at the University of Dhaka and joined University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
Islam died from complications of a heart attack on 10 October 2025, at the age of 74.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 17, 2020
It doesn't take much to realise that a thousand words and actions can be contained in a single handshake, and that communication is mixed with a culturally inscribed symbolism to invest the humble handshake with significance that belies such a simple use and gesture. The hand, across borders and societies, is more than the sum of its five fingers!
What Syed Manzoorul Islam has achieved here is no less miraculous than any of the many historical and contemporary events that have seemingly started with a handshake. But Islam's genius is to divorce the hand from its body; to whom this severed hand belongs isn't revealed to us until the penultimate chapter. What the sighting of this hand sets off is a chain of events ineluctable in their force and devastating in their significance.
Bangladesh--or more so its rural communities and landscapes--serves as the backdrop to this absurdist happenstance. A raging and destructive cyclone looms. Female snakes act in communion with their human counterparts. Rural men demonstrate in tragic ways the real power that comes from their imagined God-given domination over women.
This was a wonderful work of fiction, desperately haunting. The translation I hope does justice to the Bangla original. In any case, Syed Manzoorul Islam deserves to be widely read outside of his native Bangladesh.
What Syed Manzoorul Islam has achieved here is no less miraculous than any of the many historical and contemporary events that have seemingly started with a handshake. But Islam's genius is to divorce the hand from its body; to whom this severed hand belongs isn't revealed to us until the penultimate chapter. What the sighting of this hand sets off is a chain of events ineluctable in their force and devastating in their significance.
Bangladesh--or more so its rural communities and landscapes--serves as the backdrop to this absurdist happenstance. A raging and destructive cyclone looms. Female snakes act in communion with their human counterparts. Rural men demonstrate in tragic ways the real power that comes from their imagined God-given domination over women.
This was a wonderful work of fiction, desperately haunting. The translation I hope does justice to the Bangla original. In any case, Syed Manzoorul Islam deserves to be widely read outside of his native Bangladesh.
December 31, 2023
4.5 stars rounded up to 5.
Syed Manzoorul Islam's Absurd Night is a story replete with magical realism, the kind Western readers may associate with South American writers like Márquez, but who exist in many more storytelling traditions (in fact, one of the first known texts in the magical realism tradition, Konkaboti by Trilokyanath Mukhopadhay, came from this very region!). Absurd Night revolves around a severed woman's hand that floats in on a river in a small coastal town called Pathorghata in rural Bangladesh. The hand is perfectly and magically preserved and incites in each of this book's cast of characters—a boatman's son, a film star shooting in the area, members of a news crew—memories and emotions of their own.
At its core, this is a feminist text, one that uses the motif of the hand to speak about women's acts of care that are often taken for granted. Meanwhile, a cyclone with the name of a woman is threatening to destroy the town and everyone within it.
Syed Manzoorul Islam's Absurd Night is a story replete with magical realism, the kind Western readers may associate with South American writers like Márquez, but who exist in many more storytelling traditions (in fact, one of the first known texts in the magical realism tradition, Konkaboti by Trilokyanath Mukhopadhay, came from this very region!). Absurd Night revolves around a severed woman's hand that floats in on a river in a small coastal town called Pathorghata in rural Bangladesh. The hand is perfectly and magically preserved and incites in each of this book's cast of characters—a boatman's son, a film star shooting in the area, members of a news crew—memories and emotions of their own.
At its core, this is a feminist text, one that uses the motif of the hand to speak about women's acts of care that are often taken for granted. Meanwhile, a cyclone with the name of a woman is threatening to destroy the town and everyone within it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews