Fire in the Unnameable Country
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0670067008
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
notices the same man sitting in a cubicle near the exit, turning the dial and listening carefully to a shortwave, as if unaware of the time of day. He doesn’t seem interested in anything but his work, she realizes, and probably, like most male employees in Collections, is a lonely bachelor with a mother who lives two cities away whose death would not inspire in him the slightest feeling. She has read books about such men, and she is sure the Ministry of Radio and Communications produces scores of
early 1900s, Nasiruddin owner of spidersilk factories that produced soft cloth light to lift but impenetrable to arrows, beautiful spidersilk that drove a century of fashion and brought the late-slaving British and later invaders, the Americans who still remain, Nasiruddin who later added pop manufacture—Capsicum Cola, Valampuri Coke, Mirror Water—to his productions, was the primary advocate of rebellion against The Mirror, the Hollywood enterprise that began before Hedayat was even seed-egg and
number could assemble there and determine the following week’s grotesquery. Things went on like this until the winnings were so large but the losses so much greater, and understand it was the bloodletting that interested people most. A community theatre donated its stage, and there the daily theme of crimson relit the hearts of the young and old alike. They laughed at the ugly man with matted hair like a dog’s, whose ear was torn with a yelping cry from his very head by a former torturer of the
menwomen, at least fifty of what were ghosts apparitions without shape, howling in all kinds of languages, though the source, I swear, if I recall accurately, though do not quote: it was a boy, no older than thirteenfourteen, if you’ll hear me, beinchuts, sisterfuckers if you don’t understand me. He was standing off to the side of those motorcycle cunts, with a hand at his throat, speaking furiously with probably, looking, anyway, like fifty tongues. Thus was born the myth of the boy whose
inside, took a second chance. He introduced himself unintentionally with a hiccup, and the hiccups continued. Sir-hic, I am hic-hic to have been hic-cluded in the cavalry, but I was late hicka for my shoe, you see this, he takes off a shoe and removes a bent hobnail holding together some fragments of unstitched leather, and therefore. But this guard was not a sleepy sack of potatoes; he was as large as Pantagruel and a suspicious fellow besides, with halitosis one could sniff-source a hundred