‘I am what some call an unrelatable character,” Tara declares in A Splintering. She’s right. Ferociously unsatisfied, perceptive yet deeply unempathetic, she’s a difficult narrator to like.
Dur e Aziz Amna was born and brought up in Pakistan and lives in the US. A Splintering is her second novel, after American Fever, which won the South Asian Book Award in 2023 — and this one looks set to reach an even wider audience.
The book depicts the rigid patriarchal hierarchies of rural Pakistani families. As children in the small town of Mazinagar, Tara and her siblings witness their father’s violence. “He had hit Mother for small things, like a piece of bread served cold, while we looked on, unflinching, curious the way one is curious about a partridge about to be hunted.” As a teenager, her brother Lateef hits his sisters and berates them about dressing modestly. Their mother is proud. “This aggression is what being a man meant.”
On a rare trip to Islamabad Tara sees a cheerful, middle-class family dressed in western clothing, the woman wearing lipstick with her head uncovered. Longing sticks in her throat.
At her mother’s urging she stays in school longer than her siblings and gets an English degree, enabling her to marry up. She moves to Rawalpindi with her middle-class husband, Hamad, and gets a job teaching at the best school in the city, allowing her two children to attend without paying. Tara recalls the family she watched enviously in Islamabad. Her family now looks like theirs. “What more could I desire?”
A lot more. She harangues Hamad to earn more money, but her easygoing husband is infuriatingly satisfied with his lot. When she complains that she is juggling a job and all the housework, he replies that he never asked her to work in the first place.
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There are better ways than teaching for a woman to make quick money. At a dinner a big landowner strokes Tara’s foot under the table. She feels dizzy. The next day he comes over for sex. He gives her 20,000 rupees and her husband a job. Afterwards Tara places the bills on her chest and touches herself until she orgasms.
Investment floods into Pakistan when it allies with the US after 9/11. A lot of men get a lot of money, and Tara gets a lot of clients. “My understanding is that when a group of rich men get together, they can’t compete on wealth, since it would be tacky to compare exact figures,” she observes. “Instead, they compete on signifiers of wealth — a car, a watch, a mistress, a whore.”
Lateef has also become successful, and Tara hears rumours of his affairs. But she knows very well that if he were to find out about her clients she would die. “In every neighbourhood in every town in every province of the country, there was some man who’d killed his sister for defiling his honour, who continued to walk the street with his head held high because there were no consequences for such an act.”
Amna is a witty and spiky writer and A Splintering is a blistering portrayal of a woman unwilling to accept life’s unfairness. Despite Tara’s greed and cruelty, her disdain for the restraints of her society is mesmerising. As her schemes to escape get wilder, you urge her on.
A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna (Duckworth £16.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members