#saloon

I grabbed this book today at a secondhand store and finished the whole thing in one go. It’s one of the most compelling standout reads for me this year (not that I’ve read many books) on multiple levels which I don’t think that western publishers and reviewers have really put their pulse on, but first, a quick debrief:

The novel is unconventionally told using second person narrative through the superbly tight and acerbic monologue of a local man who has encountered an American (thereby us, the captured audience) at a market in Lahore, Pakistan. Over tea and dinner, the Pakistani stranger implores you to listen to his life story as from his beginnings, leaving his family at eighteen to study at Princeton and his brief early career at a high finance firm working on valuations, before plummeting into crisis just as the twin towers crashed on 9/11 and his American lover – a spiritually broken WASP princess – retreated into psychotic despair, forever out of his reach. 

At a turning point, the veils gradually reveal multiple complexes that fuels the narrator’s crisis: the fragile outer ego that the narrator has donned in order to join the upper echelons of the American corporate world, the sense of old world entitlement that still lingers with him since his family came from aristocratic lineage that has suffered alongside Pakistan’s relative economic decline, the fact that he is essentially a high ranking corporate slave working at the mercy of an American employer and whose acceptance into its society is broken as easily as by donning a beard among his coworkers, and the rage at how easily America can wage war over regions in which there is no real possible retaliation. 

Coupled with the obvious metaphor of his love for an American girl who is completely absorbed in her own life over a dead childhood sweetheart, and the fact that his prized Wall Street analyst job is basically destroying the livelihoods of other people by narrowly following and applying financial models and principles in order to single-mindedly achieve an outcome, it’s not hard to see how eventually he dropped out from the base of the pyramid and went back to Lahore at the height of the tensions between Pakistan and India in the aftermath of 9/11.

Western publishers and reviewers gave this book high praise for its “disturbing, chilling” aspects which I contend with, but of course, it’s understandably from an American point of view to see how a Princeton star child could go back to Pakistan to become a university lecturer that becomes embroiled in anti-American protests and (spoiler) a political plot, and thereby, a “reluctant fundamentalist” and a terrorist of sorts. I mean after all, he was using American scholarship dollars working at a prestigious American job. Anybody would be insane to give that up, right?

The prose is not so much sociopathic (as you should think) as it is acidic and witty in the narrator’s observations over entrenched behaviours in American society (through the micro-aggressions and gestures between people that ranks each other both in the corporate world and between racial divides), because the narrator had to mine every interaction deliberately in order to ensure his own survival (you have to either be an immigrant or a corporate base slave to understand this). The prose is also concise in the sense that the narrator does not indulge in excessive sentimentalism, just as the way that you would expect a high performing business analyst should write. And through very simple underpinnings, the author directs you to the heart of the rage that has eventually directed the narrator back on the path to his homeland. I mean, who wouldn’t be in a rage if they got quarantined at an airport for having a beard and knowing full well that their old country was about to get sacked?

A second observation of mine: the original author has worked at a professional services firm, otherwise he could not have easily penned all about those acquisitions and cash flows and written about the toxic professional atmosphere with such clarity that I literally feel so attacked lmfao. (This guy worked at McKinsey in management consulting and wrote his first novel at the same time, which honestly … I feel like I should just talk to this guy one day.)

Anyway this also got made into a movie which has become one of those trite exotic bomb plot movies where once again the western front conquers all, the narrator is again reduced to a Jafar villain type with the moustache and love from an American woman, above all, is a righteous thing to aspire to, which I don’t have enough eyeballs to roll over anymore. 

Oh also, this book just fuels my drive to write and create even more because I enjoy the crisp savagery of this novel very much and I would like to announce my intention and existence for the remaining decades of my life co-existing on multiple planes, by doing the thankless labour of writing, which I have to eventually come to terms with – just like the narrator in this story. This book just gives me the savage fuel, man.

Perhaps one day, I will rise to the ranks of a real intellectual but I would not play on your terms and I would not be on your team. I would be powerful enough to create through a team that I’ve assembled on my own. 

8 Bells Saloon | NO CC | ghostlycc | The Sims 4

↓ Download + details below the cut

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Lot info

✦ Replaces “8 Bells” in Strangerville

✦ Lot size: 20x20

✦ Lot type: Bar

✦ Lot traits/challenges: Party Place, Convivial

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Extra info

✦ CC-free, no custom content!

✦ The packs I used are listed right below the title at the top of this post

✦ Drag the UNZIPPED files into your TRAY folder

✦ You can also find it on the gallery, @ghostlycc

✦ Place the lot with bb.moveobjects on

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~✦TRAY FILES✦~

(free, no ads, Google Drive)

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@maxismatchccworld@s4-builds