Kirkus Supplements • Vol. 5, No. 12 • December 15, 2009
The Geometry of God
Uzma Aslam Khan
Interlink / September / 9781566567749 / $18.00
“My first two novels came to me as images,” says Uzma Aslam Khan (Trespassing, 2005, etc.). “This one came as a voice.” The author’s most recent work is a tale of familial obligations, the malleability of truth and the shifting politics of Pakistan in the 1980s and ’90s. After initially struggling with the third person, Khan heard her characters speaking and ultimately crafted the novel in first person. And while the narration passes among three characters—two sisters, Amal and Mehwish, and the “cultural freak” Noman—one character held the key: “When I got Amal’s voice, that was it,” says Khan. As the older sister, Amal wrestles with her responsibility to Mehwish, blinded in early childhood, and her own desires, including a career in the male-dominated field of paleontology. Mehwish constructs her sightless world from sounds, smells and her strong intuition, explaining herself in a piecemeal, multilingual, homophonic tongue of English peppered with Urdu and Punjabi. “Children talk their way through their own language,” says Kahn of Mehwish’s evolving voice. And finally there is Noman, a mathematician with the dangerous ability to both prove and disprove anything by citing the Quran. “Playing around with words was a fun part of writing this book,” says Kahn.