Zulfikar Ghose is a writer born in that part of pre-Partition India that is now Pakistan and who now lives just down the road from me, here in Austin, Texas. He is a fine writer, and pretty much sui generis, although elements of Rushdie and Garcia Marquez (and Beckett, and Joyce) can be detected in his novels, among which are such whimsical masterpieces as The Incredible Brazilian, The Triple Mirror of the Self, and Figures of Enchantment.
"I have no interest in the reader," says Ghose. "I never think of the reader. I don’t know who the reader is. In one’s earlier work there might be some images or expressions put there to please or make an impression on a particular writer friend, but in one’s later work the impulse comes from within the art where one writes in the company of the dead writers who become one’s most intimate associates. Sometimes I receive a letter from a reader who has liked a book; that is always gratifying, of course, but not as gratifying as the reflection that a sentence I have written would have pleased Flaubert or Proust."
Highly recommended. If I were the Michelin guide, and Ghose were a restaurant, I'd give him three stars.
