Join us on Wednesday, November 14th at 7:00 pm with Manzoor Ahtesham, as he discusses The Tale of the Missing Man (Dastan-e Lapata), winner of the Global Humanities Translation Prize. Manzoor will be joined by co-translators Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark.
The Tale of the Missing Man (Dastan-e Lapata) is a milestone in Indo-Muslim literature. A refreshingly playful novel, it explores modern Muslim life in the wake of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Zamir Ahmad Khan suffers from a mix of alienation, guilt, and postmodern anxiety that defies diagnosis. His wife abandons him to his reflections about his childhood, writing, ill-fated affairs, and his hometown, Bhopal, as he attempts to unravel the lies that brought him to his current state (while weaving new ones).
New York magazine cited the book as one of “the world’s best-untranslated novels.” In addition to raising important questions about Muslim identity, Ahtesham offers a very funny and thoroughly self-reflective commentary on the modern author’s difficulties in writing an autobiography.