The Centre (2023) by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

 

British-Pakistani author Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Book Review

The Centre (2023)

by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

    The Centre is a very interesting debut novel by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi.  It's part sci-fi, partly about the experience of being a British-Pakastani woman in the early 21st century.  There are themes of class, race, colonialism and even LGBTQ issues.  In short, The Centre is an ambitious, commercially-savvy debut, and it bodes well for Siddiqi and her future in the literary marketplace.   The Centre is very much in the category of books where extensive discussion of the plot can operate like a spoiler- even if there are no spoilers involved in the review, but the basic idea is that Anissa- the narrator- is a young, independent British-Pakistani woman living in London, eking out a living as a translator of Bollywood film subtitles into English,  Fortunately she is a woman of independent means, descended from one of the wealthy Indian-Muslim families who managed to relocate from India to Pakistan after the partition.

   Anissa shares this background with author Salman Rushdie, who's Indian Muslim family relocated when Rushdie was a teenager.  While taking classes at a local university she meets a young white guy who can fluently speak a dozen languages. She becomes intrigued, and eventually he introduces her to The Centre, where a select few can pay twenty thousand a pop to fluently learn a language in 10 days.  Members are sworn to secrecy, and Anissa is skeptical from the start, even as she gets deeply involved.

  I listened to the Audiobook, narrated by actress Balvinder Sopal- she was great, listening to her was a real pleasure.  I also very much enjoyed Siddiqi's authorial voice which reminded me of different writers from America (Moshfegh) and South America (Melchor, Enriquez).