| Title | : | A Beheading |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle , Hardcover , Paperback , Audiobook & More |
| Number of Pages | : | - |
| Publication | : | Published January 1, 2005 |
https://granta.com/a-beheading/
A Beheading Reviews
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Quite amazing how this short story can be so powerful and touch so many subjects.
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It's Hamid. You already know what I think of this short story. It is all that and more.
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Blink-of an-eye short story
True statements:
1. This is effing fantastic!
2. Love the voice of the narrator.
3. The last line is scrumptious.
4. Made me curious, sad, scared, hopeful, tense, horrified. A few paragraphs there, a ton of emotion here.
5. I will probably read this at least three more times.
6. I better get hopping and read Hamid’s popular Exit West.
True questions:
1. How can such a short story be packed with so much emotion and suspense?
2. Does the title tell all? Hm...
3. Does Hamid have a short story collection? Must find out...
Click here to read this little gem:
https://granta.com/a-beheading/ -
Killer short story. Intense, emotional, and terrifying. You can read it in a trice, but don't expect to forget it so quickly.
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This short story illustrates why Mohsin Hamid at his best,is such a good writer. It takes just a few minutes to read,and packs quite a punch. It is shocking,disturbing and ultimately violent. So few words and such a powerful impact.
It was written at a time,when the Pakistani Taliban were actually beheading people in Pakistan.
It is available online. (See the book description for the link). -
A short story that can elicit so much emotion using so few words is a rare commodity. Reading this after the beautiful short
Sea Prayer made it all the more affecting. Wow! -
No words.
https://granta.com/a-beheading/ -
Yikes. Mohsin Hamid is a fearless writer. As this excruciating short story shows, he is vivid and direct in depicting contemporary acts of political brutality.
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Well written very short short-story, somewhat gruesome. The title is not a metaphor.
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Yikes! Absolutely ALARMING and FRIGHTENING super short story! Enough said.
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A very short story - it could almost be considered a fragment of a story.
It is almost an internal monologue - the characters thoughts alone, except there are some mumbled words to his captors.
There is no context offered to the story - except what the reader can weave around the basic information provided. Perhaps a journalist, abducted in the middle of the night from his home. Bound, forced into a car, set up in front of a camera. The outcome is obvious - the title of the story.
No explanation, no background, just a gruesome result.
In the space of a few short minutes of reading, the reader is offered pace, a foreboding atmosphere, a shared confusion, darkness, emotion and a rawness.
4 stars. -
Powerful, intense short story. It's free from Granta.
https://granta.com/a-beheading/ -
I wish I wasn’t my age. I wish I was as old as my parents. Or as young as my son. I wish it didn’t have to be me telling my wife to stay where she is, saying everything will be fine in a voice she doesn’t believe and I don’t believe either.
Mohsin Hamid’s A Beheading is pretty much the only story I have ever read where the word vivid applies in all its glory. You hear that word quite often, mostly as a throwaway adjective for either an incredibly intense reading experience or as a synonym for ‘must praise the story but can’t find the right word’. Here, though, it fits very well.
A few other adjectives also come to mind once one is done with the 3-page short story in Granta’s 2010 issue: Disconcerting. Jarring. Depressing. But that is as it should be, given the subject matter Mohsin Hamid has taken upon himself to write about in this story that begins as quickly and abruptly as it ends, taking us from the explosion of a window in a silent night to the eventual, inevitable conclusion of blood and death.
The summary
I hear the window shatter.
It is maybe an indication of how the story will progress by the way it abruptly begins, throwing us right in the middle of the scene. Our unnamed protagonist gets up suddenly in the middle of the night, woken up by a smashed window. He knows what’s happening. He knows who is coming. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with the reality of the situation.
I shut the bedroom door and lock it behind me. Shadows are jumping and stretching from multiple torches. I raise both my hands. ‘I’m here,’ I say to them. I want to say it loudly. I sound like a whispering child. ‘Please. Everything is all right.’
It picks up pace, short choppy sentences that carry a remarkable amount of lucidity moving us forward as our hero is beaten up, dragged outside and stuffed unceremoniously in a car’s trunk. He’s distorted, confused, scared, and we are right there with him, living these feelings.
My mouth doesn’t work properly so I have to speak slowly. Even then I sound like I’m drunk. Or like someone has cut off half my tongue.
We feel his fear when he’s left alone in a room with paint peeling, dried urine sticking to his legs. We watch with dread as the men return, tripods and cameras and UPS unit carted along with them. It’s inevitable, the story’s conclusion, but we continue reading anyway. It’s like a train wreck you can’t look away from, except this time you’re inside the train, watching it race towards the cliff off which it is bound to go over, crashing and burning as it goes.
Tears are coming out of my eyes. That’s good. The more pathetic I look, the better. ‘Sirs,’ I say in the most grovelling Urdu I can manage. ‘What have I done? I beg your forgiveness.’
The story is short but very, very effective. Mohsin hamid doesn’t waste words, instead writing with such lucidity that it’s hard to not get sucked in immediately to the desperation of the scene. This owes its greatest credit to the faithful attention paid to the basic concept of ‘Show, don’t tell.’ Each sentence is a feeling expressed, an action our protagonist does. It’s a close-up, first person encounter of the most disturbing kind, and in that lies its very appeal.
The background
Being a journalist in Pakistan is a risky plan. There is always
the threat of being murdered, of
ending up missing, of dangerous assignments and extortion and
getting caught in cross fire or combat situations. It’s a hazardous job, made more so by the various volatile elements in the country willing to endorse target killing, torture and kidnapping as a method of
shutting up those who want to report the truth.
Mohsin Hamid puts us in the position of one such journalist who is hours away from paying for writing something he shouldn’t have. And coming from a country where reporting the truth can get you in trouble gives the story an extra edge, a depth that will resonate with anyone who has spoken out against a wrong and lived to regret it. Journalists in Pakistan are under constant threat, whether they be reporting on
ethnicity or on
religious groups. From cosmopolitan cities like Karachi to war-ravaged areas like Fata, violence on those who are part of the news dissemination process has been a constant problem for days, and Mohsin Hamid seeks to bring it to the front and centre with one of the most effective forms of influence: storytelling.
The Questions
In an article printed in Express Tribune on 4 June, 2011, Mohsin Hamid
wrote: “Just before moving back to Pakistan a year and a half ago, I wrote a short story called “A Beheading”. It was about the imaginary kidnapping and beheading of a nameless Pakistani writer, told from that doomed and terrified man’s own point of view.”
This raised my first question: the identity of our unnamed, unknown protagonist. Because until I read this, I hadn’t realized the main character was a writer. In retrospect, certain lines make this fact obvious, but because being a writer has such a fundamental importance in this story, given that Mohsin Hamid is literally basing his kidnapping on his profession, this seems like a pretty important thing to miss. But throughout the story, I didn’t connect the dots between his pleas to let him go and his promises to not write. And this happened because in Pakistan, one can be dragged out of their houses for a beheading for a variety of mind-boggling reasons. And while a profession is a chosen, well-thought out decision, other offences which can lead to such things happen are far beyond the control of the people who are accused of them.
I wish I could remember how to say my prayers. I’d ask them to let me pray. Show them we’re the same. But I can’t risk it. I’ll make a mistake and if they see that, things will be even worse for me.
I, in fact, thought this person was of a religious minority. I thought the protagonist was a Christian or a Hindu, an Ahmedi or a Hazara. In Pakistan, it’s dangerous to be anything other than a heterosexual Sunni Muslim male with a job that isn't threatening to anyone with a gun. And given the constant, widely-encompassing violence against the religious minorities in our country, it’s easy to see why one’s mind would go that way.
Once one digs into the religious layers of this story, it opens itself up to multiple interpretations. I thought the man was a member of a religious minority who might know a few Muslim phrases because he lived in a Muslim country. My best friend thought he was a secular person born in a Muslim family, who would stumble over duas and not be in the habit of praying. It is precisely this that shows how exposing the barest of details means a reader will project their own world view onto a story. Mohsin Hamid might not have meant for these interpretations to exist, or even thought about someone paying attention to these details, but moments like these make the story bigger than just words on paper.
I wonder if my wife is still alive and if she’s going to sleep with another man after I’m gone. How many men is she going to sleep with? I hope she doesn’t. I hope she’s still alive.
My second question was one about stereotypes, and about how one’s gender can define one’s thinking. After reading this story, I texted my best friend: Is a man about to be beheaded capable of thinking of one’s wife’s future sexual exploits?
Maybe it’s a reflection of the ‘men constantly think about sex’ idea, she pointed out. Maybe it’s him trying to distract himself from what is happening around him, I debated. Still, the fact remains. On the very cusp of death, what does one think about? And more importantly, how are these thoughts limited by gender?
The point, underneath all this speculation, comes to how much we trust one male writer to act as a representation of all men everywhere. Maybe Mohsin hamid thinks this way. Maybe he thinks most men think this way. Maybe he thinks most men should think this way. It’s a mystery, but maybe it’s not a blanket depiction of everyone with a Y chromosome everywhere.
They tape my mouth shut and pin me flat on my stomach. One of them gets behind me and pulls my head up by the hair. It feels sexual the way he does it.
The recommendation
This entry in Granta is probably the quickest read with the greatest impact. It’s wonderful in its handling, written with equal counts feeling and control, and tackling an important issue. Definitely Recommended. -
https://granta.com/a-beheading/
Hamid has the ability to make us see much deeper into what might just be a snippet of news for us. -
Last moments.
This is a very short story that is well worth reading, not for the spectacle, but for the empathy evoked during the last thoughts of a man. There is a balance between state control and chaos; power will always reinforce itself, but if you cut all the safety lines when pruning you risk.
Link to read:
"A Beheading" by Mohsin Hamid -
“I open my eyes to see it on the floor like ink and I watch as I end before I am empty.”
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Quite a writing on the adversities one can face in the name of 'Freedom of Speech'. Pakistan is a country full of such examples, specially south Pakistan. Karachi, Bahawalpur, Larkana; these are just few places to name otherwise the life in Pakistan is just for Capitalists. No life is to be considered normal for normal human beings in that country of hell. Most who gained fame and money left the country already. Rest are enjoying the power but for the one is earning his food daily-basis, is getting nothing and still facing lot more issues in the name of religion and conservative thoughts on the same.
Rightly put the words from Author about the expressions one must carry whether it would be in favor or against the religion. Hurting emotions is one thing and putting truth on table is another.
Nice short read. -
I'm not usually a short story reader, but a review from a Goodreads friend was so compelling I had to pick this one up. It's an extremely short story, from the author of 2017 standout
Exit West. It chronicles in taut, rapid detail the interior monologue of a journalist taken in the middle of the night by captors to his beheading.
It's extraordinarily well done. Hamid takes the reader inside the protagonist's head as the thoughts come rushing one after another, as the action barrels along at full tilt. It's a completely understandable mix of confusion, terror, regret, hope, and discordant banality that anyone who's been through calamity can recognize as the haphazard way the brain processes disaster as it's unfolding.
There's the irrational, plaintive, hoping against hope that this is somehow happening to someone else, not me:
I wish I wasn’t my age. I wish I was as old as my parents. Or as young as my son. I wish it didn’t have to be me telling my wife to stay where she is, saying everything will be fine in a voice she doesn’t believe and I don’t believe either.
There's the intrusion of mundane details in the midst of the most terrifying reality, testimony to the brain's scrambled state:
They have a copper-coloured ’81 Corolla. We used to have a car like that when I was growing up. This one is in bad shape. They open the trunk and dump me inside.
And there's the speed with which the human spirit can adjust to the unthinkable, especially when there's another, worse unthinkable on the horizon:
I don’t want to die but I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be tortured. I don’t want anyone to crush my balls with a pair of pliers and put his cigarette out in my eye. I don’t want this car ride ever to end. I’m getting used to it now.
In a few short pages, Hamid takes the reader through a thousand expressions of the human experience, in intense prose that nevertheless avoids any sense of breathlessness and is never overwrought. It's simply distilled, concentrated emotion.
It's remarkable, and it's pushed
Exit West high up on the to-read pile. -
What was I thinking?
I avoid reading news, articles, fiction etc on the topic of violence. My mind is quite imaginative without these stories.
The story was short, gory and terrifying. It is depressing. It left me a little bit suffocated, too. -
The shortest horror story I've read! Very compelling in its savagery...
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I had embarked on reading this very short title as a means to introduce myself to the author Mohsin Hamid and help decide if I should pick up his work
Exit West.
I came in, as usual, with the lowest possible expectations to not be sorely disappointed as I have been in the past with new literary territory. The result however was beyond anything I could have imagined. Is it not very oft that a story, especially one as short as this, can grip me in the way 'A Beheading' has!
Gory, horrific and so very visually detailed, this will leave your gut wrenched no matter how you feel about the story at the end of reading it. Mohsin Hamid has perfectly captured the terrifying realities of living under or even in the proximity of extremism, whatever cause, shape or form it may hold.
The monologue of the protagonist rings home deeply; the visions, the gripping emotions, the sincere thoughts and the powerful savagery of the moment, is all but too vivid, too hard not to imagine and live, regardless of how much you try not to.
A quick read. But a gruesome one indeed! -
anything by Mohsin Hamid is brilliant, so i don't really need to review this, do i? you already know you will read it and bathe in the beauty of his prose... yep.
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It took me five minutes to read this, though it's vivid images will probably live with me for a lifetime.
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It is written well, cause it is short yet haunting. But I do not have the stomach for violence.
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What a powerfull and descriptive piece of writing. I could sense the helplessness and fear coursing through the reporter's mind. The monologue is his coping mechanism which only makes matters worse. Ultimately driving him to beg for mercy submiting to his will to the captors. Words were not needed at that point; the same mechanism that got him marked for a grewsome fate.
Definetly reading more material from Mohsin Hamid. -
This is an excellent and powerful short story about a man who gets kidnapped and the emotions he experiences. He gets put into the boot of a car, taken out, and has his head chopped off, as the title alludes to. Hamid has something of the subversive about him – he's one of my favourite authors today.
"A Beheading" should be made into a full-length novel. I'm sure it will win the Booker Prize. -
Powerful short story.
Read it on here -
https://granta.com/a-beheading/ -
A violent short story, filled with dread, that left me feeling like it came too fast, too forcefully, without any thought.
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Painful and brutal.
This four minute read can be found here:
https://granta.com/a-beheading/ -
CONTAINS SPOILERS
A quick read that packs so much: terrorism, politics, religion, family, gender roles. I love the universality of this story because so many places have become increasingly difficult for journalists to do their work.
What was peculiar and perhaps fascinating for me as well was the bit where he wonders what his exit would mean for his wife: it's not "is she going to be ok?" but if she's going to sleep with other men. This bit-though a tiny part of the narrative-is like other lines in this story: packed with several interpretations and questions. Is the protagonist a secular man who's forgotten how to pray but not how to hold onto patriarchal views of a woman's place?
At the same time though, I didn't think this was particularly groundbreaking because there are other works (in literature and film) that have dealt with such scenarios before. Still, it's definitely commendable to squeeze so much in such a tiny space.
