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 started this story with such high hopes: an entrancing setting, a fascinating man looking back on his life, interwoven stories to yield a potent, complex read. This was not that story for me. It started with the footnotes and the chaotic plot lines and continued through ... Did I mention that there were footnotes and that they are essential to read to understand and move forward in the story? Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. I hated them, wound up feeling that the story was too much complexity, too much shoved in one small novel. To be fair to the author and the publisher, I pressed on until I was about 25% of the way through and then had to give it up. I love the idea of this story, the terrific characters, flashes of brilliant prose, but....the footnotes and the chaotic structure made it a CNR: Could Not Read.

I can’t remember what it was about the description for H. M. Naqvi’s upcoming novel, The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack that first attracted my attention, and now that I’ve finished reading it, I’m not sure what to make of it.

Abdullah lives at the old family estate, the Lodge, along with his youngest brother (Babu) and that brother’s family. Babu along with two of his other brothers are pushing Abdullah to agree to join them in selling the Lodge (probably to a developer). At seventy years old, however, Abdullah clings to the family homestead having been convinced that he would one day die there as their father did before them. With the hope that his fifth and final brother will side with him, Abdullah works to avoid and thwart his siblings and their plans. At the same time, Abdullah has taken in his friend’s grandson, Bosco, to keep safe while his neighborhood endures a turf war between some local gangsters. Another new acquaintance of Abdullah’s, however, threatens to bring that very turf war to the Lodge when Abdullah meets the enchanting Jugnu and tries to pursue her romantically.

There is a lot going on in The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, to say the least. Much of it is further confused by the narrative structure the story takes. Presented as a manuscript or accounting written by Abdullah, it doesn’t follow a completely linear timeline but rather skips around to incidents from his childhood and early adulthood (when he first took over from his ailing father helping to run the Olympus hotel) and imposes lessons learned then to incidents in the narrative present. There is also liberal use of footnotes to present anecdotal asides about Abdullah’s home city of Currachee and factoids he learned in his personal studies. The digital format in which I read the book made the footnotes more difficult to maneuver than they would be in a printed copy, but they could be quite entertaining, even if they were also, occasionally disruptive to the flow of the story. This structural framing for the book was one of the things I thought worked particularly well.

Because the plot and presentation can be a bit chaotic, the book is most enjoyable when you simply go along for the ride and don’t think about the specifics of what’s happening too much. The aspects of the plot that I latched onto strongest were those of the family and the tension between Abdullah and some of his siblings. The age differences between the brothers as well as their different professional fields, levels of success, tragic experiences, etc. all contribute to what they each think of the others and how they’ll behave toward one another. Abdullah is a failure in the eyes of his two older brothers and is a burden and bad influence in the eyes of his youngest brother (and his wife). The specters of age and obligation raise their heads as who owes whom for what and therefore should throw their support in which direction come to dominate the conversation while Abdullah struggles to keep up with the other things happening in his life just then.

The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack will be available March 12, 2019.

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.

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.

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.

Abdullah is a man after my own heart. He is endlessly curious about everything but struggles to finish anything. There’s just so much to know! His rooms are filled with books and notes for all the monographs he intends to write, but hasn’t quite gotten around to writing. He also battles diabetes, gout, and a persistent family that wants him to sell The Lodge—the ancestral pile in Karachi, Pakistan. Oh, and an old friend has pawned off a grandson on Abdullah to teach him character and the Classics. It’s a lot for a seventy-something year old man.

The novel is littered with footnotes as Abdullah lurches around The Lodge and Karachi. These footnotes range all over the intellectual map, offering histories of Pakistan, jazz, Islam, Abdullah’s legal and romantic woes, food, poetry, and much more. (There is also a helpful glossary of words from Urdu and other languages spoken in southern Pakistan at the end.) I love footnotes! Especially ones that add sardonic and arch notes to what quickly becomes a picaresque folly as Abdullah tries to hold on to The Lodge.

I really liked The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack. For all that he is not the easiest person to get along with and would probably bore the pants off me if he ever managed to corner me for a lecture, I enjoyed riding along on his shoulder around Karachi. Abdullah reminds me of Count Alexander Rostov, of A Gentleman in Moscow, because of the way he attempts to live in the past as much as possible as the world hurtles along around him. Abdullah even insists on using archaic spellings of places in Pakistan; Karachi is constantly spelled Currachee and it took me a bit of Googling to figure out where and when this book takes place. Once I got the hang of Abdullah’s style, I felt like I had an inside glimpse of a lost version of Pakistan that lived between the Partition and the rise of militant dictators.

Readers who like quirky, gentle men at odds with the times; humor mixed with a dash of tristesse; and heavy use of footnotes will find much to enjoy in The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack.

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 (particularly when reading as an ebook) - they would work much better had they been incorporated into the prose itself.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed reading this book. Funny and sad, and terrifying at different points in the book. Overall, very well written!

Ha Jin said it best: “H.M. Naqvi is a superb stylist and writes like a poet. With careful attention to details and with enormous patience he presents a world that is at once fascinating and familiar. The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is completely original in form and sensibility.”—Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award

OK, the story felt fictional, real, the stuff of urban legends too, in places.

Being from the sub continent, I was fascinated, bored and entertained by the tales of Abdullah, the Cossack. It was definitely an interesting read even if, this being an advanced copy, the format was frustrating and distracting at times.

While I was intrigued by the synopsis and very taken in by the admittedly beautiful prose within the book, I don't think this book was quite what I expected. I read through it fast purely because of the prose, but I found myself skimming rather than being invested.

I appreciated it from a linguistic perspective but it's not the same narrative technique which I usually prefer, it was digressing heavily and quite hard to follow. I also didn't like the constant footnotes and indented references, I like my pages to be uninterrupted so this was something I found irritating as a reader.

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.

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.

A genre-busting, page-turning debut, A genius with words . . . I haven’t read anything so delicious in a long time, A tale that is colorfully detailed, funny in places, sad in others, frightening in still others.