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Thursday March 28, 2024

A book cementing reader’s ties with Intezar Hussain

By Ibne Ahmad
July 18, 2021

Islamabad : The book ‘Intezar Dastan’ written by Dr. Fareed Hussaini presents summaries of Intezar Hussain’s seven collections of short stories and five novels.

Intezar Hussain’s writings deal with his childhood, the cafés and lanes of the cities where he lived, his past and present, myth, history, and dreams. He is the most prominent fiction writer, known for his stories woven around the experience of Partition and for his individual style.

Intezar Hussain loved shorter forms. His novella ‘Day’ captures the daily life in vivid details like the streets, temple, trees, flowers, color-changing chameleons and insects. His novella Dastan creates authentic narratives to revisit the tragic events of 1857 through surrealistic symbolism and mythological spin. One of his famous novels, “Basti” is against the backdrop of partition.

Doing a summary of a short story or a novel requires the writer to read carefully and digest a work that is directly relevant to the subject. On the surface, such assignments look pretty simple and easy; in reality, they demand a certain amount of sophistication on the writer’s part. To write an effective summary, you need good skills in reading comprehension and analysis, as well as a good grasp of the academic field in which the work is written. Reading ‘Intezar Dastan’ reveals the writer enjoys all these qualities.

If you look at the summaries, you will see that they end up achieving two things: they give the reader an outline of what the author of a work is doing and saying; and they tell us the writer’s assessment of the work: what is valuable about it, what its limitations are.

To highlight the essentials of another writer’s idea rather than to provide a complete and detailed restatement is the purpose of summary writing. A summary helps you understand the major direction, the main points, and the overall shape of the more detailed original. It restates the essence of the original in as few words as possible.

The summary tells us what a story or the novel is about, and gives us the writer’s opinion of whether or not it is worth our time to read it. Not many people want to know what happens in a story or a novel before reading it, even if this may help them decide that the story is worth reading. Dr. Fareed Hussaini has produced these summaries with a specific objective in mind: to help a reader, researcher, and literature lover decide whether he/she would be interested in reading the complete story.

Although summarizing the literary genres like short stories and novels is a formidable challenge in itself, and the variety of symbols used by Intezar Hussain made summarizing fiction a very difficult task, Dr. Fareed Hussaini has performed this task in a unique way.