July 10, 2025
ISLAMABAD – In A Splintering — Dur e Aziz Amna’s forthcoming second novel — money “is the third person in any room,” a central character propelling the plot forward. The novel itself is characterised by the protagonist’s (Tara’s) larger-than-life longing for it.
At one point, Tara, hailing from Mazinagar, observes a family of four at a park in Islamabad — their “Western clothes” and the “woman’s head resting on the man’s shoulder.”
“I turned dizzy with longing,” she proclaims and it is this gritty desire that animates the entire novel. “How would it feel to be the woman with the light pink lips?” Tara asks herself and turns this question into a kind of pervading, obsessive manifesto for herself.
Amna’s work stands out in the South Asian literary landscape because it is distinctly unsentimental. Her narrator in this novel is un-plagued by nostalgia, eager to leave her home behind for city life. She promises herself as a young girl to “find a way to join the beautiful, free people of the city” but whether this new life can really be beautiful or free is a central question the novel grapples with.
This is not a novel that concerns itself with the gilded end-product that the protagonist may or may not obtain but one that slices through the obsession of wanting more itself.
Tara is forward-facing, averse to looking back. Her “skin prickles” when she hears her father-in-law talk about Mazinagar as a lost Eden because for her, as a woman, it never was and, more importantly, never could be even remotely close to heaven.
Tara’s internal world, pulsating and charged, is at odds with her steely, removed observations of the politics of the external world. While politics is an important aspect of this novel, Tara’s references to Pakistani and global current affairs are plain, almost without affect, as though she is rattling off everyday occurrences from a newspaper. Lines like “That September, the towers fell in America” or, simply, “America invaded Iraq” are matter-of-fact, direct. They contrast Tara’s language around her own desires, injecting urgency into what she wants and what she acts upon by distinguishing it from what merely happens around her.
There are things she can control and things she cannot control — and encountering a character who will do everything in their power to change the trajectory of their life is intoxicating and refreshing. It makes it difficult to put the book down or to interrupt the flow of Tara’s lunging towards a greater life. Willing to go to unique lengths for a higher status, Tara often makes interesting negotiations with motherhood and family life that feel new and fresh — even dark — in the Pakistani literary landscape.
One of the more intriguing parts of the novel is the films Tara creates and plays in her head, a kind of ambitious escape she summons in her mind, stories of men and women living lives distinct from the ones citizens of Mazinagar seem destined to.
In those imaginings, she is “both actor and director.” It is this quality — as though the book I am reading is actively being shaped by the character I am reading about, as I read it — that sets it apart.
When global literary women’s fiction — more specifically, white women’s fiction — seems markedly littered with novels about women doing nothing and being aimless (Otessa Mosfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation springs to mind), this book is different in its approach in that action and movement sculpt every part of it, spurring it on. It seems fitting that such a novel would emerge out of a non-Western context.
Unlike most South Asian literature in English, A Splintering is also not trying to create some grand portrait of a South Asian country. Its descriptions of Mazinagar are industrial and provincial — divorced from the South Asian motifs (like monsoon, immigration, nostalgia) we have come to expect in such literature.
And despite the clear, precise prose Amna uses (one might describe it as almost ‘economical’) in service of plot and momentum, there are still lines that are poetic and evocative, making the reader slow down and revel in them.
Proclamations like “I have no nobility. I come from darkness and filth”, descriptions of her hometown as this “bloody, orphaned place” and ruminations like “I had learned to define myself an unwoman, as someone who would not fall prey to the neuroses and handicaps attendant on womanhood. But how long could one live in opposition to an idea, as the negation of something?” make for a lyrical, enriching reading experience, where language is used with the precision of a taut arrow in a bow, and not for mere decoration.
“Like a snake,” Tara tries to shed her old skin and where she comes from. In many ways, she is only borrowing new, much more complex problems. For all her efforts to discard it, home too, like money, is another character in the novel, refusing ever to fully dissipate. But it is her clear-eyed resolve and a gaze that never wavers from the goalpost that makes this novel vigorous and worth the read.
The author received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an independent review.