I am a huge fan of historical fiction and very interested in intercultural and religious practices and beliefs. While the premise of this book was interesting and had a lot of potential in general, I feel it didn't quite live up to my expectations. The idea behind it was funny and it could have been very entertaining. Misadventure or mishap I suppose is the main idea. He's not a very present father, nor is he a reliable worker. He's unfortunate in most areas of his life actually. This story could have been much more entertaining and I can't help feeling that perhaps it lost some of its humour in translation. It has potential though and may appeal to others more than it did to me!

I received an early review copy of this book from Net Galley.

I couldn’t finish this book. I read about 1/5, and still hadn’t formed any connection to the story or characters. There’s one main character who seems to be going through a midlife crisis of sorts, and the part I read was an accounting of people he remembered from his childhood. They all blended together for me, and there was no real action. He was not a likable character and I just couldn’t make myself commit to spending more time with him when there are so many other books I want to read. I fear I’m not giving this book a fair shot, so it may get better as it goes along, but I couldn’t stick it out.

A novel set in Bhopal, India, mostly in the 1980s, but with significant flashbacks to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Zamir Ahmad Khan is an excessively average guy: middle-aged, middle class, married to a wife he seems to have no particular feelings for, father of two young children whom he spends little time with, and not as close to his friends as he used to be. He had a job selling antique furniture, but lost it due to his strategy of simply not showing up for months on end. Zamir believes he has a mysterious disease that has caused all of these problems, but multiple doctors haven't been able to diagnose anything, and indeed he seems to have no symptoms beyond vague feelings of alienation and guilt. Zamir is the missing man of the title, but he's not missing in any literal sense; instead, he's missing from his own life, missing any idea of who he is or what he's meant to be doing.

There's no real plot to the novel. Zamir watches his life slowly disintegrate while reminiscing about people or places he once knew in short, disintegrated vignettes that make up the majority of the page count. This is all extremely slow and extremely unengaging; I really had to struggle even to finish the book. My main problem wasn't just boredom, though. Zamir is a complete asshole of a protagonist. Despite all his moping and claims of ill use, he continually commits petty crimes against others: deliberately running up debts at small shops with no intention to pay, spreading negative rumors about people, starting fights, committing adultery. And for all his whining and avowed guilt, he never changes or does anything to correct these problems. He's a realistic enough person, I suppose, but I absolutely do not want to spend two hundred pages with him. The afterword describes this as "subversive and sardonic", but if that was the intention, it absolutely did not come through in the writing. Though I don't know if that's the fault of the original author or the translators.

Overall a draggy book with an irritating protagonist. There are a million novels about middle class India that are so, so much better than this.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2614227836

Early on in reading The Tale of the Missing Man, we catch on that Zamir Ahmad Khan the protagonist of the story is an unreliable narrator. His current life is perceived to be in shambles - his wife Rahat has left for her parents' together with their two daughters, he has somewhat unexplainable health ailments, his business ventures have failed, he shuts himself at home. It is clear too that Zamir thinks, over-thinks, ruminates about the same events in his life turning them over and over in his mind, clinging stubbornly to his own suppositions.

The choice of the book title seems to encompass a few layers: Zamir is lost in today's modern world unable to keep up and constantly looks to the past (he is not present); Zamir was missing physically when he was needed whether at home or at work; Zamir feels alienated not only from his life but even to himself akin to a depersonalization or dissociative disorder. There is a poignant scene where Zamir's father is fading health-wise and keeps on asking, "Where is Zamir?" although his sought for son was right in front of him. One ends up alternately detesting Zamir for all the ways he let people around him down and being too naive or sympathizing with him for his losses and all that's gone wrong in his life.

Much of the book centres around Bhopal in the 1970s and 1980s. Some background historical signposts such as the Emergency and Union Carbide gas leak are mentioned without much background explanation. However, given that the original book was published in Hindi (original name Dastane Lapata in 1995), the author likely felt his audience would know the context.

Thanks to Netgalley and Northwestern University Press for an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

Edit to add: On a re-reading of the book, I forgot to mention that the author Manzoor Ahtesham chooses to inject his authorial voice into the text at two different spots which was an interesting intentional choice. He does explain that the missing man, the lost Bhopali, Zamir Ahmad Khan, is akin to his alter-ego. Some of what happens to Zamir, like his meeting with Anisa, did in fact happen to the author. I am somewhat less comfortable with how the author reveals that the real-life 'Anisa' is now overweight despite "going to a thousand fitness clubs." This is unnecessarily unkind, given she and others in his circle know exactly who he is referring to. The author also discusses some political happenings around the time this novel is set but the reader still needs to have some background knowledge to appreciate his views. I feel myself even more torn between sympathizing with and detesting Zamir on this second read, perhaps leaning more towards sympathy. He sabotages his own happiness and success, seeming to self-flagellate and self-blame unconsciously. His unceasing ruminations and reminiscing trap him in a sticky web of recrimination and sorrow. No wonder this book is so highly acclaimed, the inner world of a conflicted man is well-depicted here and scenes from the protagonist's lost childhood and lost innocence especially bring a bittersweet feeling.

It's okay. I just don't see how everyday life of a middle class person becomes 'different' simply if labeled 'Muslim Experience.'

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. There are spelling mistakes in this translation: Phapho (should be Phopho), Nasrat (Nusrat) etc.

Tale of the Missing Man is one of the most ennui full books I've read in awhile. Zamir just doesn't do anything and does not seem to have depression, he's just so totally self-pitying it is hard to wade through it to get to the (what for me was) more interesting part of the book-life as a Muslim in Bhopal, India. I would have appreciated so much more active engagement with being a religious minority in a country of displaced populations, the environmental disaster of Bhopal, etc etc but instead, it was a series of stories about people whose names I could not recall mere minutes after reading. It's not to say that those people weren't at all interesting-in fact, many seemed almost blasphemous against one cultural more or another but it was very hard to sustain my reading mojo.

Character can mean either a person imagined up by an author, but also the strengths and flaws that make up a person’s personality. In The Tale of the Missing Man, by Manzoor Ahtesham and translated by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark, we have a meditation on both. Zamir Ahmad Khan has lived in Bhopal, India for the length of his sad sack life. We meet him in his doctor’s office, where he complains of symptoms of dissociation and malaise. Then Zamir takes us back to his childhood to show how he became who and what he is. At the end, we’re left to think about the missed opportunities of Zamir’s life. Could things have been different if he’d made different choices? Was it even possible to choose other paths?

A third of the way into the book, the narrator interrupts to explain (emphatically) that Zamir Ahmad Khan is not the narrator. The narrator chides any readers who might draw comparisons between Zamir and the narrator, to ignore the many similarities between the two. Instead, the narrator asks us to think about what might have happened if. The problem with thinking about the what ifs of Zamir’s life is that Zamir seems pathologically incapable of making good choices in his life. He falls in love with the wrong people, then fails them. He goes to the wrong school. He makes the wrong friends. He lies, all the time. He just can’t seem to help himself.

Apart from the interruptions from the narrator, The Tale of the Missing Man is written as a series of memories centered on people who have since passed away. Zamir’s life is full of wonderfully flawed people, sometimes hilariously so. To be honest, I enjoyed the other people in Zamir’s life a lot more than I liked him. Zamir, unlike those other characters, doesn’t seem to have anything he wants. Where other characters pursue careers or build families, Zamir only seems to know what he doesn’t want and avoids commitment wherever possible. I don’t mind unlikeable characters normally, but the ones who don’t know what they want or have no ambitions annoy me. Zamir annoyed me a lot.

Grunebaum and Stark do sterling work translating Ahtesham’s novel. In their afterword, they write about Ahtesham’s skill with Hindi and Urdu, as well as a Persian style of storytelling called dastan, in a way that makes me strongly suspect that I’m missing layers of meaning in The Tale of Missing Man. This isn’t the fault of the translators. They captured Ahtesham’s meandering and highly detailed writing. The liveliness of the characters and the grit of Bhopal come through brilliantly.

The Tale of the Missing Man will be best enjoyed by readers who love detailed character studies. Readers who also like to think about a writer might be thinking about and trying to accomplish by creating characters will definitely find food for thought. I found the book overlong. The longer it went on, the more I skimmed. I just didn’t care enough about Zamir to stay glued to the text. There were parts of the book I really liked. The character studies and the ending were very good. The Tale of the Missing Man just wasn’t for me.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 15 August 2018.