In short, "Launching" is an excellent novel which exposes the dark side which is crime pertaining to the otherwise shiny paradise that is the Maldives. Few Maldivians now would have been spared some kind of exposure to the environment of crime. While narcotics are been sold publicly on the streets, we can't say that vehicles acting as carriers of alcohol cases are few.
Author Aminath Ibrahim is the recipient of golden awards in the stream of story writing. She has delved in intellectual studies and worked for years as a lecturer of Maldives' native language Dhivehi. She holds a first degree and a master's degree in Dhivehi language and culture. She has written and published numerous books for children. In "Launching", she writes of people who depicts a carefully constructed public facade of innocence while deep down they engage in organized crime. In this novel she writes about how a network of such criminals operates.
While Maldives has become a nest of drugs and alcohol, her novel touches on how criminals carry out these offences and how police discover and dismantle these criminal networks.
Aminath weaves the narrative in such a way that leads the reader from the start on a suspenseful journey and therefore you can call this a work of the thriller genre. She peels off the story layer by layer until towards the climactic end, everyone and everything are unraveled. This is why I felt that this novel belongs to the mystery suspense thriller genre.
Another noticeable characteristic of the novel is that she doesn't indulge in describing "redundant" scenes. For instance, if beforehand she makes it clear how an offender is to be apprehended, she doesn't actually go all the way in describing the event since the reader knows beforehand what the scene is going to be like.
When asked why Aminath had chosen to give an English title to her novel, she said that it was because the protagonist was a writer and that the novels he wrote in the story were all given the titles of Aminath's books; in a way she was introducing the "launching" of her own novels from within the narrative of this novel. She said that there was no short phrase in Dhivehi to describe the introduction of something and therefore, as a writer, she felt a one-word title even in English would be appropriate.
This is my first reading of a novel by Aminath written for adults. Before this, I had read her children's books tilted "Koimala" and "Rannamaari" because she wanted me to translate the two books into English for an adult and foreign tourist audience who may prefer to read in English.
As "Launching" is a great novel, and especially because I had come to know that Aminath bases her fiction on non-fiction material, I have developed a great interest to read her Dhivehi language stories. Perhaps because she had been a Dhivehi teacher before her retirement, her use and style of Dhivehi is smooth and easy reading.
Therefore, I have already bought her novels that have become popular. It includes the first collection of her short stories. Already I have started reading it. The first short story titled "Maa las vejje", which loosely translates to "Too late", is the number-one award winner in the Maldives' national short story writing competition. It is different and interesting. Because the five short stories in this collection are based on true events, I have developed a great interest in completing reading the collection soon.
Nice. Thank you for taking the time to write this synopsis. We need people to be doing these things
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome. I agree we need more of these :)
Delete