Hassan’s State of Affairs

Bestselling and critically acclaimed, Mirza Athar Baig is one of the most important contemporary Urdu novelists. Hassan’s State of Affairs, his first book to be translated into English, is a surreal ride through Pakistan. It follows an accountant, Hassan, and a group of filmmakers, Masquerade Productions, who are working on Pakistan’s first surrealist film, titled This Film Cannot Be Made. The film’s production inevitably runs into hurdles that escalate from the comic to the horrific, and the text itself explodes into multiple storylines, genres and characters, bending language and form as it traces the rise of religious intolerance and totalitarianism and their stifling effect on life and art. The result is an entirely new kind of novel.