92
the business he founds, and the home he carefully
restores, somehow go awry, and his final gesture is
ambivalent. By leaving Bedley Run, he aims to pro-
tect those he loves through his very absence, while
still hoping that he can remain in their memory
without haunting them.
Bibliography
Chuh, Kandice. “Discomforting Knowledge, or, Ko-
rean ‘Comfort Women’ and Asian Americanist
Critical Practice.” Journal of Asian American Stud-
ies 6, no. 1 (2003): 5–23.
Lee, Young-Oak. “Gender, Race, and the Nation in A
Gesture Life.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary
Fiction 46, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 146–159.
Jaime Cleland
Ghose, Zulfikar (1935– )
Born in Pakistan, raised in India, and educated
in Great Britain (B.A., University of Keele, 1959),
Zulfikar Ghose has taught in the Department of
English at the University of Texas since 1969 and
currently resides in Austin, Texas. Before turning to
academe, Ghose also wrote as a cricket correspon-
dent for the Observer in London, 1960–65, and
was a contractual reviewer for the Times Literary
Supplement and The Guardian. A prolific novelist,
poet, and critic, Ghose has published 11 novels, six
collections of poetry, and seven volumes of criti-
cism and nonfiction.
In his curious blend of poetic writing and
razor-sharp prose, Ghose navigates equally well
within traditional realist fiction, magical realism,
and, with his later works, metafictional (post-
modernist fiction that brings explicit attention to
its constructedness and status as fiction) terrains.
Ghose’s works not only defy strict genre classifi-
cation, but remain untied to any particular place
or any particular national context. This type of
movement, of continual travel, makes it difficult
to pin down Ghose’s writing to any one particular
type, form, or context. As Chelva Kanaganayakam
notes in the preface to his interview with Ghose,
“to limit Ghose, whose sensibility is an evolving
one, to a preconceived taxonomy would be both
futile and frustrating” (172). The idea of home or
homeland receives continual interrogation, but the
importance for Ghose lies not in answers but in
the questions themselves.
Ghose’s best-known novels include those com-
prising the Incredible Brazilian trilogy—The Native
(1972), The Beautiful Empire (1975), and A Differ-
ent World (1978)—which feature the protagonist
Gregório Pieixoto da Silva Xavier, a character who,
reincarnated through and across historical time,
confronts Brazil’s curious and conflicting pasts:
the land of the native Brazilians, its status as a Eu-
ropean colony, and the rise to nationhood. Sprawl-
ing and intricate, the novels together allow Ghose
the space to demonstrate the overwhelming com-
plexity of Brazil’s past, which undoubtedly comes
to bear on the present situation of the nation.
Ghose’s later novels, in particular Don Bueno
(1984), Figures of Enchantment (1986), and The
Triple Mirror of the Self (1992), demonstrate a
marked interest in the form of fiction, its possi-
bilities and limitations. In an interview with Kana-
ganayakam, Ghose remarked: “As soon as you use
words you are referring to reality; indeed, there is
no reality outside language that can be said to have
meaning; and it must follow that you cannot per-
ceive a complex reality without creating a complex
language” (176). Indeed language remains the sub-
ject of Ghose’s work, just as much as, if not more
than, characters, plot, history, or any element of
reality outside of the work itself.
In particular, Ghose’s most recent novel, The
Triple Mirror of the Self, challenges the reader to
constantly rethink genre conventions and the ways
in which stories relate and mix together. Jumping
from continent to continent, circling among past,
present, and future, not even the characters have
solid grounding. Reflecting and refracting one an-
other, the novel’s main characters—Roshan Urim,
Isabel, and Jonathan Pons—meld into what Reed
Way Dasenbrock refers to as “some kind of larger,
composite self ” (786). Such attention to form and
experimentation characterizes all of Ghose’s fic-
tion, perhaps most explicitly so in this particular
novel.
As an academic critic, Ghose has published
works ranging from meditations on the forms and92 Ghose, Zulfikar