Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Audible Audio Edition) Mohammed Hanif Nimra Bucha Whole Story Audiobooks Books
Download As PDF : Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Audible Audio Edition) Mohammed Hanif Nimra Bucha Whole Story Audiobooks Books
Only weeks since her release from Borstal, Alice is a candidate for the position of junior nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments. With guidance from the working nurse's manual, and some tricks she picked up in prison, Alice brings support to the thousands of patients littering the hospital's corridors and concrete courtyard. In the process, she attracts the attention of a lovesick patient, Teddy Bunt, apprentice to the nefarious 'Gentleman Squad' of the Karachi police.
They fall in love; Teddy with sudden violence, Alice with cautious optimism. Their love is unexpected, but the consequences are not.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Audible Audio Edition) Mohammed Hanif Nimra Bucha Whole Story Audiobooks Books
Reading this novel felt to me somewhat like my movie experience with "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" with that delightful, energetic Indian hotel manager--or mis-manager. Of course the novel takes place in Pakistan, not India. And Alice is certainly not like the hotel manager, but the author's narrative voice most certainly is. It is a wonderful voice.This is a funny-sad novel written in the style of an Pakistani speaking English--by the way it is published in England's English, i.e., humour. Potential readers need to be aware that you may need to be patient getting into the syntax as well as the sytle, one in which the reader isn't always that certain what is happening when a new scene emerges, but then suddenly the reader has the ah-ha enlightenments.
The novel is set in Karachi's Christian slum, the French Colony, with Alice Bhatti, skinny from malnutrition except large in breats, is the delightful main character, "an underpaid junior nurse in an understaffed" [very, very understaffed] "welfare hospital, The Scared. The cast is wonderful including Alice's father, Joseph, who isn't really very wonderful at all--her mother died when Alice was young--but then emerges in a very unique and very surprising role at the end in the epilogue. (The reader will not easily forget the ending of this novel, an ending that gives meaning to the title.) Noor is a 17-year-old hospital worker who simultaneously is caring for his mother, dying of cancer, often the only way to swat away the pests that inhabit the unsanitary place. The not-so-skilled main doctor, Dr. Pereira, and the sardonic nurse supervising Alice, Sisster Hina Alvi. Alice, by the way, was, in the corrupted view of the administration of the nursing school where she was "trained" "its most troublesome student." Delightfully so for the reader.
"Sometimes it seems to her [Alice] that the seven thousand patients in the hospital, hundreds crawling in the corridor, thousands more out in the compound using bricks as pillows, are feeling a bit better because they are in the hospital compound, only a few metres away from operating theatres, labs and drug dispensaries." In other words his hospital is on the edge of the section of Karachi where the wealthy live and work and are cared for.
The novel is filled with back stories, sometimes told obliquely in unexpected places, giving the reader a sudden jolt of additional pleasure--or sadness.
Alice meets Teddy Butt, an underling policeman who waxes his body-builder being and is in charge of getting criminals to and from places including not-Abu Zar. (I will not explain the not-Abu because that is part of the fun of the novel if you like your fun to be on the flip side of tragic. And Teddy's boss is Inspector Malangi who has a rather, well, I won't tell, last day on the job, on the day he retires.
And then comes the epilogue. And I won't say more except that this is a really underrated novel by some of the reviewers here.
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Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Audible Audio Edition) Mohammed Hanif Nimra Bucha Whole Story Audiobooks Books Reviews
Very strange book but compelling. Unique. Written about a place (Pakistan) and people (Pakistanis) that are as alien to me as Martians and yet the writer made them come alive and be believable. The ending was thought provoking.
I do not think that any woman would find the abuse Alice suffers to be humorous. The book is, on occasion, absurd. The characters are memorable. The story is well told, just not comic.
What makes this book interesting, is how Alice lives in such a violent, hard, seemingly heartless war zone, and somehow seems to survive without appearing as damaged as her life is shown to us. I have never been in a war zone, and was sometimes shocked at what I read. But then, one must survive they only way they can. Alice has no idea about her 'miracles', but has no time to consider this with her busy life as a nurse in an understaffed, overpopulated hospital with corrupt staff and patients!
It's a tough world over there, count your blessings for those of you in a country free of war!
this novel will keep you laughing, but it will also teach your more about life for women in Pakistan than you might want to know. Most interesting is hanif's show the reader how Alice adapts to the severe constrictions of her life...some of them idiosyncratic and others cultural..right to the end. i mean the end.
Not sure what was humorous about this book. I enjoyed reading a case of exploding mangoes by the same author, however this one didn't really appeal to me much.
Well done Mohammad! I loved "the Case of Exploding Mangoes" & you've managed to out-do yourself with Alice Bhatti. It's a rarity to find a writer who can convey a difficult topic with such wit & irony, which leaves me looking forward to your next book.
I'm not going to give away the plots to Alice Bhatti or The Case of Exploding Mangoes because readers need to explore for themselves...I will say though, if you want to read a story conveying the reality people live with in the Far East but don't want the mental drain of kaled Hosseini (whom I loved reading, but left me exhausted) read a Mohammad Hanif book...he's a fantastic storyteller.
I don't know how Mohammed Hanif does it. He is a journalist in Karachi who works for the BBC and contributes to The New York Times. He is also a novelist who pours his despair, anger and wild creativity into phantasmagorical riffs about Pakistan, a country I would not care to visit. I am grateful for his voice.
"Our Lady of Alice Bhatti" is a riff on Pakistan's brutal oppression of women as seen through the brief life of a hospital nurse from one of Karachi's slums. It is cleverly structured and somehow Hanif manages to leaven his tale with dark humor. As I said, I don't know how Hanif does it. This novel is brilliant.
Reading this novel felt to me somewhat like my movie experience with "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" with that delightful, energetic Indian hotel manager--or mis-manager. Of course the novel takes place in Pakistan, not India. And Alice is certainly not like the hotel manager, but the author's narrative voice most certainly is. It is a wonderful voice.
This is a funny-sad novel written in the style of an Pakistani speaking English--by the way it is published in England's English, i.e., humour. Potential readers need to be aware that you may need to be patient getting into the syntax as well as the sytle, one in which the reader isn't always that certain what is happening when a new scene emerges, but then suddenly the reader has the ah-ha enlightenments.
The novel is set in Karachi's Christian slum, the French Colony, with Alice Bhatti, skinny from malnutrition except large in breats, is the delightful main character, "an underpaid junior nurse in an understaffed" [very, very understaffed] "welfare hospital, The Scared. The cast is wonderful including Alice's father, Joseph, who isn't really very wonderful at all--her mother died when Alice was young--but then emerges in a very unique and very surprising role at the end in the epilogue. (The reader will not easily forget the ending of this novel, an ending that gives meaning to the title.) Noor is a 17-year-old hospital worker who simultaneously is caring for his mother, dying of cancer, often the only way to swat away the pests that inhabit the unsanitary place. The not-so-skilled main doctor, Dr. Pereira, and the sardonic nurse supervising Alice, Sisster Hina Alvi. Alice, by the way, was, in the corrupted view of the administration of the nursing school where she was "trained" "its most troublesome student." Delightfully so for the reader.
"Sometimes it seems to her [Alice] that the seven thousand patients in the hospital, hundreds crawling in the corridor, thousands more out in the compound using bricks as pillows, are feeling a bit better because they are in the hospital compound, only a few metres away from operating theatres, labs and drug dispensaries." In other words his hospital is on the edge of the section of Karachi where the wealthy live and work and are cared for.
The novel is filled with back stories, sometimes told obliquely in unexpected places, giving the reader a sudden jolt of additional pleasure--or sadness.
Alice meets Teddy Butt, an underling policeman who waxes his body-builder being and is in charge of getting criminals to and from places including not-Abu Zar. (I will not explain the not-Abu because that is part of the fun of the novel if you like your fun to be on the flip side of tragic. And Teddy's boss is Inspector Malangi who has a rather, well, I won't tell, last day on the job, on the day he retires.
And then comes the epilogue. And I won't say more except that this is a really underrated novel by some of the reviewers here.
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