A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A Washington Post , Rocky Mountain News , Boston Globe Best Book of the Year

Intrigue and subterfuge combine with bad luck and good in this darkly comic debut about love, betrayal, tyranny, family, and a conspiracy trying its damnedest to happen.

Ali Shigri, Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of the Fury Squadron, is on a mission to avenge his father's suspicious death, which the government calls a suicide.Ali's target is none other than General Zia ul-Haq, dictator of Pakistani. Enlisting a rag-tag group of conspirators, including his cologne-bathed roommate, a hash-smoking American lieutenant, and a mango-besotted crow, Ali sets his elaborate plan in motion. There's only one problem: the line of would-be Zia assassins is longer than he could have possibly known.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

There is something about these bloody squadron leaders that makes them think that if they lock you up in a cell, put their stinking mouth to your ear, and shout something about your mother, they can find all the answers. They are generally a sad lot, these leaders without any squadrons to lead. It's their own lack of leadership qualities that stops them mid-career, nowhere for them to go except from one training institute to another, permanent seconds in command to one commander or the other. You can tell them from their belts, loose and low, straining under the weight of their paunches. Or from their berets, so carefully positioned to hide that shiny bald patch. Schemes for part-time M.B.A.'s and a new life are trying hard to keep pace with missed promotions and pension plans. Look at the arrangement of fruit salad on my tormentor's chest, above the left pocket of his uniform shirt, and you can read his whole biography. A faded paratrooper's badge is the only thing that he had to leave his barracks to earn. The medals in the first row just came and pinned themselves to his chest. He got them because he was there. The Fortieth Independence Day medal. The Squadron Anniversary medal. Today-I-did-not-jerk-off medal. Then the second row, fruits of his own hard labour and leadership. One for organising a squash tournament, another for the great battle that was tree-plantation week. The leader with his mouth to my ear and my mother on his mind has had a freebie to Mecca and is wearing a haj medal, too. As Obaid used to say, "God's glory. God's glory. For every monkey there is a houri." The 2nd OIC is wasting more of his already-wasted life trying to break me down with his bad breath and his incessant shouting. Doesn't he know that I actually invented some of the bullshit that he is pouring into my ear? Hasn't he heard about the Shigri treatment? Doesn't he know that I used to get invited to other squadrons in the middle of the night to make the new arrivals cry with my three-minute routine about their mothers? Does he really think that "fuck your fucking mother," even when delivered at strength 5, still has any meaning when you are weeks away from the president's annual inspection and becoming a commissioned officer? The theory used to be damn simple: Any good soldier learns to shut out the noise and delink such expressions from their apparent meaning. I mean, when they say that thing about your mother, they have absolutely no intention--and I am certain no desire, either--to do what they say they want to do with your mother. They say it because it comes out rapid-fire and sounds cool and requires absolutely no imagination. The last syllable of mother reverberates in your head for a while as it is delivered with their lips glued to your ear. And that is just about that. They have not even seen your poor mother. Anybody who breaks down at the sheer volume of this should stay in his little village and tend his father's goats or should study biology and become a doctor, and then they can have all the bloody peace and quiet they want. Because as a soldier, noise is the first thing you learn to defend yourself against, and as an officer, noise is the first weapon of attack you learn to use. Unless you are in the Silent Drill Squad. Look at the parade square during the morning drill and see who commands it. Who rules? There are more than a thousand of us, picked from a population of 130 million, put through psychological and physical tests so strenuous that only one in a hundred applicants makes it, and when this cream of our nation, as we are constantly reminded we are, arrives here, who leads them? The one with the loudest voice, the one with the clearest throat, the one whose chest can expand to produce a command that stuns the morning crows and makes the most stubborn of cadets raise their knees to waist level and bring the world to a standstill as their he Excerpted from A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Set in Pakistan in the 1980s, this first novel revolves around the events leading up to the plane crash that killed General Zia, then president of the country. The crash has been the subject of all sorts of rumors, and the author energetically seizes upon them and adds several of his own. The novel centers on Ali Shigri, a junior under officer in the Pakistani air force and son of a high-ranking commander who apparently committed suicide years earlier but whose death is beginning to look more like a political execution. When General Zia comes upon a passage in the Qur'an that he thinks foretells his death, he expands his already severe dictatorship by calling for heightened security. Shigri is taken into custody and given the full interrogation treatment but is eventually released. He then prepares for a demonstration of a military drill with his squad in front of the president himself. In keeping with the novel's somewhat surrealistic approach, a crow that has overheard a blind woman curse the president has flown several thousand miles to intersect with the flight route of the presidential party. Entertainingly bizarre and still seriously literate, this novel is recommended for larger fiction collections.-Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Pakistan's ongoing political turmoil adds a piquant edge to this fact-based farce spun from the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed General Zia, the dictator who toppled Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of recently assassinated Benazir Bhutto. Two parallel assassination plots converge in Hanif's darkly comic debut: Air Force Junior Under Officer Ali Shigri, sure that his renowned military father's alleged suicide was actually a murder, hopes to kill Zia, who he holds responsible. Meanwhile, disgruntled Zia underlings scheme to release poison gas into the ventilation system of the general's plane. Supporting characters include Bannon, a hash-smoking CIA officer posing as an American drill instructor; Obaid, Shigri's Rilke-reading, perfume-wearing barracks pal, whose friendship sometimes segues into sex; and, in a foreboding cameo, a "lanky man with a flowing beard," identified as OBL, who is among the guests at a Felliniesque party at the American ambassador's residence. The Pakistan-born author served in his nation's air force for several years, which adds daffy verisimilitude to his depiction of military foibles that recalls the satirical wallop of Catch 22, as well as some heft to the sagely absurd depiction of his homeland's history of political conspiracies and corruption. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

It is 1988, and Pakistan's military government is flush with success. Its coffers are full of U.S. weapons and American dollars, CIA agents are everywhere, and the Russians are beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan. Military strongman General Zia ul Huk is the darling of CIA director Bill Casey, and Pakistan; Air Force underofficer Ali Shigri, a young man of good family, is plotting to assassinate Zia. Shigri has just learned that Zia and his deputies are responsible for the suicide of his father, the much-respected Colonel Shigri. Ali comes under suspicion by the country's dreaded ISI (Interservices Intelligence), and a painful end seems preordained. First-novelist Hanif, who spent seven years in the Pakistani Air Force and currently runs the Urdu service for the BBC, has crafted a clever black comedy about military culture, love, tyranny, family, and the events that eventually brought us to September 11, 2001. His depictions of Zia, Pakistani military life, the machinations of Pakistani military pols, and CIA cowboys are believable and convincingly detailed. Other elements of the book are purely fanciful, but they also work. Entertaining and illuminating.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2008 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Journalist Hanif's first novel is a darkly witty imagining of the circumstances surrounding the mysterious plane crash that killed Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia, in August 1988. The central figure is a young military officer named Ali Shigri whose much-decorated father was found hanging from a ceiling fan, an alleged suicide. Ali knows, however, that his father's death was something more sinister, and he sets out first to identify the responsible party, Zia, and then--by way of a loopy plan involving swordsmanship and obscure pharmacology--to exact revenge. The book's omniscient narrator gets into the heads of multiple characters, including that of the General himself; his ambitious second-in-command, General Akhtar; a smooth torturer named Major Kiyani; a communist street sweeper who for a time occupies a prison cell near Ali's; a blind rape victim who has been imprisoned for fornication; and a wayward and sugar-drunk crow. Even Osama bin Laden has a cameo, at a Fourth of July bash. But plot summary misleads; the novel has less in common with the sober literature of fact than it does with Latin American magical realism (especially novels about mythic dictators such as Gabriel Garc"a Márquez's Autumn of the Patriarch) and absurdist military comedy (like Joseph Heller's Catch-22). Hanif adopts a playful, exuberant voice that's almost a parody of old-fashioned omniscience, as competing theories and assassination plots are ingeniously combined and overlaid. Uneasy rests the head that wears the General's famous twirled mustache--everybody's out to get him. A sure-footed, inventive debut that deftly undercuts its moral rage with comedy and deepens its comedy with moral rage. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.