Jane Austen's Books & Adaptations discussion
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Unmarriageable
Books/Adaptations of the Month
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February & March 2022 Group Read: Unmarriagable
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Mod
Ooh, that sounds good! And I can get it on audio, so I'll try to join you!
The author is narrating it herself, which adds a real flavour to the story.
I'll try to join you for a re-read. :)
Mod
The bulk of the book is revolving around marriage and weddings, so I am attaching a useful link about Muslim Weddings (including Pakistan).https://www.brides.com/muslim-wedding...
The book is set (mostly) in Punjab Province, Pakistan, so here is another link for infohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjab,...
plus another one on Lahore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore
and
Islamabad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamabad
Mod
I've not abandoned this read. I just need to first finish the book I'm hosting a group read for in another group. I should be realisticaly done with that next Sunday and then I have a whole week reserved for Unmarriagable.
I haven't started yet either, as I'm trying to finish another audiobook. But Unmarriageable is next!
I already finished it for a challenge, but happy drop in and discuss whenever you are ready.
Mod
Anyway, I changed the end date for this group read to 30th March. So we have another full month to read and discuss the book.
Sure, Zuzana.We have a charity shop in the small city where I live and they are collecting all kinds of stuff to be delivered to our boder cities/towns in Hungary where they have already set up crisis centres for the refugees from Ukraine. So we are doing shopping and donating stuff as required.
I've started and I'm really enjoying it! I think I'm on Chapter 4 (audio). I laughed out loud from the very first chapter's reference to the 1995 miniseries. :D And again with this advice from Mrs. Binat in Chapter 3:"Keep your distance without keeping your distance. Let him caress you without coming anywhere near you. Coo sweet somethings into his ears without opening your mouth."
Clear as mud, Mummy, lol!
Ok, I just finished Part 1, so halfway through. I just have to say that Mrs. Binat gives the original Mrs. Bennet a real run for her money!In the clinic (view spoiler)
And then when the Mr. Collins character is introduced, (view spoiler)
I'm really enjoying this one. 😃
Just finished the book! And I loved it! It's so faithful to P&P, and yet it's its own story too.I forgot to pop in here earlier to say that the infamous proposal was so blunt and hilarious, I laughed out loud!
I really enjoyed this one. :D
I am glad you liked it, Laurie. Did you listen to the audiobook?
Yes! The audiobook is definitely the way to go! Glad you suggested it! ^_^
Great. I thought the author narrating it herself gave the strory extra flavour.
And talking about flavours, all that gorgeous food we were told about.... made me salivate throughout.
Melindam wrote: "And talking about flavours, all that gorgeous food we were told about.... made me salivate throughout."I know! We sometimes get takeout from a local Indian restaurant, so I was familiar with some of the dishes, like biryani, and I know how delicious they are. I wanted to try EVERYTHING in the book! Oh, and I love shrimp, so the "prawn wedding" would have been heaven for me, lol!
LOL. Love prawns, too.
And reading about all the Muslim wedding traditions was lovely. I kept picturing to myself all the colours and the glamour (real and fake as well).
Have you seen the film "Bride and Pejudice"? While the setting for that was Amritsar, India, I read that culturally and gepgraphically it is tge "same" region, Punjab, so there are quite a lot of similarities.
I have not seen it, but I'm thinking I should fix that!
Mod
Melindam wrote: "Great. I thought the author narrating it herself gave the strory extra flavour."
I caved and bought the audiobook. Started listening today. I'm about 15 percent in.
My initial thoughts: I appreciate the humor, yet I find the overall situation - the fact that there are women who face these problems in 21st century, e.g. 16yo brides that don't get to finish high school because their husband won't let them - really depressing.
Mod
1/ I liked the conversation between Alys and Sherry about women's age and the necessity to lie about it all the time. What I find hilarious is that I couldn't find info on Soniah Kamal's age. It's nowhere to be found. :D I was curious because I wanted to know how old she had been in 2000 when the novel is set.
Incidentally, I'm the same age as Sherry - 41 going on 42 - and single. Sherry's story just makes me realize how lucky I have been to be born in a place where I don't have to fight for basic gender equality and economic and social rights.
2/ The fact that professors, journalists, doctors & engineers from middle-class backgrounds are included into the category of "absurdities" shows the "absurd" amount of priviledge Binat family believes they're entitled to. Because how dare the highly educated professional men even think of marrying one of the daughters of a failed businessman?! Oh, the social divide is abysmal. It's a comedy yet it's somewhat painful to read about.
3/ Alys was employed by the best high school in Dilipabad despite being a 2nd year college dropout (for no fault of her own but that's beside the point). Says a lot about quality of women's education in Pakistan.
4/ Dilipabad is a fictional town/city in Pakistan. I think it's supposed to be located not that far from Lahore. Lahore is only about 500 km away from Swat District where Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head in 2012 at the age of 15 for the crime of attending school while female.
Mod
Sherry has become a favourite character of mine from this book during the re-read. Her situation and the courage she faces it with is really something else. (especially as we are given more and more info about Pakistan's marriage market and how agreements may be made.. uuughhh).
Mari's moralising is a completely different kettle of fish, placed into this particular religious setting.
Zuzana wrote: "4/ Dilipabad is a fictional town/city in Pakistan. I think it's supposed to be located not that far from Lahore. Lahore is only about 500 km away from Swat District where Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head in 2012 at the age of 15 for the crime of attending school while female."That's one thing that made me wonder just how realistic this version of Pakistan is. I admit to not knowing much about the country, but I tried to do a bit of research when I finished the book. I wondered if things for women had gotten worse since the early 2000s or if Kamal just didn't want to make the story that serious or if it was a difference between classes. Do either of you have any insight on that?
Mod
I would guess that there are two major factors:
Geography: Lahore is on the India-Pakistan border and is located in the Punjab province. I would expect that the further north and west you go the situation is getting worse. As you get nearer to the Afghanistan border you'll wade into the Pashtun territory. It's the part of Pakistan where the Pakistani Taliban operates. I read Malala's biography (thoughsome time ago). If I remember correctly they were responsible for the attack on the bus and Malala's injury.
& Class divide: Lahore is one of the richest Pakistani cities. According to Wiki Lahore is "one of Pakistan's most socially liberal, progressive, and cosmopolitan cities". I'm not surprised. Where there's wealth there's more freedom to do what is forbidden to the poor masses.
What I found telling is that Alys and Jena were sent to Saudi Arabia to college. I have read In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor's Journey in the Saudi Kingdom by Qanta A. Ahmed who spent two (?) years in Rijad and was there during 9/11. The author is a British muslim with Pakistani roots. She was shocked to learn that Saudis consider Pakistanis to be inferior. Most Pakistanis in Saudi Arabia work in menial jobs - sending their wages back to Pakistan to support the families they left behind. For Alys to be seemingly unaware and to remember fondly her college days only shows how impossibly wealthy Binat family had been before their father's fall from grace. So wealthy in fact that common stereotypes (and xenophoby) didn't apply to them.
Mod
The best one: An Online Conversation with Soniah Kamal: https://youtu.be/JO3ZZtUML1I
It's about her life, about her opinions on life in Pakistan, on Jane Austen and quite a lot of info on her writing Unmarriagable, why she made some of the narrative choices etc. It's great. The downside it's 1h 15 min long.
If you don't have 1+ hours you can watch this interview from Lahore Literary Festival 2019. It's 25 minutes long and contains a lot of interesting details. https://youtu.be/G1PW1mc01BU
*****
If you want to watch only one video then I'd recommend the Unmarriagable episode from the Brown Girls Read podcast. I absolutely loved it. It's two Indian women (Daman Tiwana and Khyati Thakur) reviewing the book based on their personal experience growing up and living in the South Asian culture.
You can watch it on YT: https://youtu.be/4wYUDRwfCOY (32 min)
It's also available through Apple Podcasts.
Thanks for the links! I'll definitely check those out.
Thanks, Zuzana. They sound really interesting.
Mod
- What I liked:
I really enjoyed learning about Pakistani culture and society. It reminded me that one of the aspects of JA books I always love is social history - learning about life in the 18th and early 19th century.
I loved most of the characters and enjoyed all the small changes/updates to them - e.g. making Jenna and Alys older than their future husbands, Alys's hair, Sheri's smoking. My favorite character: Sheri.
Loved the audiobook narrated by the author.
- What I liked less:
To have Jane Austen and her works feature so heavily in the book and to keep the names of all the characters with only minimal changes while none of the characters acknowledged the similarities to P&P was strange.
The plot was way too similar to the point it was just the same. I watched several interviews with the author, where she tried to explain why she followed the original so closely, yet she just repeated that it was the "paralel retelling" and she wanted to "reclaim" the novel from the English colonialists. That's IMO no real explanation especially as she claims how she doesn't like how and where some of the characters ended (e.g. Sheri and Alys).
It is uncanny how the P&P plot fits into today's (or early 00th) Pakistan. And by uncanny I mean eerie. While I love P&P - there is a lot to unpack about the status of women in the gentry class in the Regency era. I accept things that would be unthinkable to me in today's society mainly because there's a comfortable and unbreachable divide of 200+ years between now and then. I am comforted by the progress that our society made in the meantime and thus can enjoy the story and concentrate on the style, humor and other aspects of the book. There is no such comfort while reading Unmarriageable. In the world of globalization the distance of 7000 km means nothing and to think of women living like that today only a stone throw away from us IS disturbing. I know that the book is meant to be funny and some of it is exagerated for the sake of humor, yet the author (and readers from South Asia) insists that it presents a rather accurate depiction of the state of things for women living there.
- What i didn't like:
The book would have benefitted from a more strict editor.
--The author tends to overexplain things. E.g. when Wickham shared his false story of woe with Alys, I instantly thought how clever it was that it shared similarities with Mr Binat's estrangement from his family and that it could be used later to explain why Alys responded the way she did. But no, the author just needed to spell it out right away. (and then when Alys learned the truth - the author repeated the same explanation.) There were several such instances in the book. There's no subtext, everything needs to be spelled out.
--The mentions of books, movies and celebrities throughout the book would have been a clever device to introduce us to more aspects of Pakistani culture, had it been done more gracefully. More often than not it was an excerpt from a laundry list dumped randomly onto the page. There were occasions where the namedrops/ title drops made sense and served the story, e.g. Darcy bringing his favorite book to Alys and the two of them discussing it later. But for every such instance there were at least five that made no sense. The blatant one - the enumeration of JA's family members, places where she lived and P&P characters at the end crowbared into the Alys's final scene in the book.
Overall: I liked the book. It gets solid three stars from me. :)
Jane Austen's Books & Adaptations
Books mentioned in this topic
In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor's Journey in the Saudi Kingdom (other topics)Unmarriageable (other topics)
Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal
"In this one-of-a-kind retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in modern-day Pakistan, Alys Binat has sworn never to marry—until an encounter with one Mr. Darsee at a wedding makes her reconsider.
A scandal and vicious rumor concerning the Binat family have destroyed their fortune and prospects for desirable marriages, but Alys, the second and most practical of the five Binat daughters, has found happiness teaching English literature to schoolgirls. Knowing that many of her students won’t make it to graduation before dropping out to marry and have children, Alys teaches them about Jane Austen and her other literary heroes and hopes to inspire the girls to dream of more.
When an invitation arrives to the biggest wedding their small town has seen in years, Mrs. Binat, certain that their luck is about to change, excitedly sets to work preparing her daughters to fish for rich, eligible bachelors. On the first night of the festivities, Alys’s lovely older sister, Jena, catches the eye of Fahad “Bungles” Bingla, the wildly successful—and single—entrepreneur. But Bungles’s friend Valentine Darsee is clearly unimpressed by the Binat family. Alys accidentally overhears his unflattering assessment of her and quickly dismisses him and his snobbish ways. As the days of lavish wedding parties unfold, the Binats wait breathlessly to see if Jena will land a proposal—and Alys begins to realize that Darsee’s brusque manner may be hiding a very different man from the one she saw at first glance.
Told with wry wit and colorful prose, Unmarriageable is a charming update on Jane Austen’s beloved novel and an exhilarating exploration of love, marriage, class, and sisterhood."
Challenge Category: Sequels & Re-tellings
Read anytime in February or March 2022.