Getting 2 Know Tariq Malik

As a conclusion to Ray Bradbury’s excellent short story “The Pedestrian” the ‘dysfunctional’ protagonist is questioned by a police-bot as to ‘why the human is walking outside on the street in open air’. ‘I am walking to see, I am walking to breathe fresh air,’ he responds. ‘But air is pumped into your room, and you have wall-to-wall viewing screens in your room’, comes the reprimand before he is arrested for exhibiting ‘deviant behaviour’.

In anthropologist/essayist Loren Eiseley’s epic The Star Thrower we encounter the author morosely stumbling upon a dawn beachcomber who is tossing stranded starfish back into the receding tide while everyone else is busy collecting them. ‘The stars throw well. One can help them’, he cryptically offers Eiseley, who murmurs under his breath: ‘I collect neither the living nor the dead. Death is the only collector.’ However, the very next night, intending to join the star-thrower in his lonely task Eiseley sets the alarm for early dawn. He concludes: ‘tomorrow I would walk in the storm. I would walk remembering Bacon’s forgotten words ‘for the uses of life’’.

What perceptive writers everywhere try to do is write ‘for the uses of life’. And, it matters more each day that they do.

What’s the best book you’ve read lately, and why?

I have just finished reading John Updike’s 1978 novel The Coup. Written from the perspective of a deposed North African Arab tyrant (loosely modelled on Libya’s Gaddafi, albeit Western educated) who is writing his memoirs in a comfortable and safe location in Paris, the protagonist writes of how he engineered the coup that removed his predecessor. This unusual and striking portrait of Africa that Updike weaves is one that is viewed through an Islamic/Marxist lens. Having personally visited Africa only briefly, Updike nevertheless strips the continent of all its tourist trappings and expectations.

Updike’s soaring ‘butterfly sentences’ swoop and tease enticing details out of the most trivial details: a Mercedes ‘trailing its illusory mountain of dust’, and ‘we saw men attacking and pulverizing anthills to recover the crumbs of grain…’ Where Updike failed in his 2008 ‘The Terrorist’ to convincingly realize Muslim characters and their fractured world in the post 9/11 milieu, here he succeeds brilliantly in an under-rated but striking and rare performance piece.