Book Review

“Poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really, literature is pathetic,” declares Eileen Myles in the introduction to their 2022 anthology Pathetic Literature. To anyone who’s ever tried to hand a feeling over to language, this provocation is, in fact, a form of praise. For Myles, the pathetic is neither shameful nor unspeakable. Rather, it is an opportunity for courage, to feel, and more crucially, to accept and articulate what is felt. To be pathetic, simply put, is to risk exposure, to be seen naked through a crack in the wall.

Mahreen Sohail understands this. Midway through her debut collection, Small Scale Sinners, a narrator observes, “There are many things we take to our graves just because there is no language for how to recount the experience of having lived through them.” Her stories, however, refuse to enact this silence. Across twelve pieces, Sohail presents the interiorities of women who, while often rendered interchangeable by circumstance, nevertheless resist erasure through their negotiations with desire and duty.

The women in these stories feel familiar, selves we may have been in the past or might imagine ourselves becoming in the future: a girl who cuts her beautiful long hair for her boyfriend’s dying mother; a group of sixth graders whose fascination with their twin classmates tips into cruelty; a sister who leaves another behind to attend college in America and confronts the consequences of that choice; a daughter who reckons with the slow vigil of parental decline; a newlywed swallowed by the life she must now accept and an unmarried woman fading into the one that never changed.

What binds these narratives is a sustained meditation on how individuals within families are stifled by social expectation, even as they evolve across time, loss, and transnational displacement. Crucially, Sohail declines to situate these experiences within a Western gaze, resisting the impulse to translate her characters for a Western audience. In one story, for example, a girl expelled from her home for sneaking out with a classmate is narrated without moralizing or ethnographic explanation; through a child’s perspective and an attentive rendering of gesture and silence, the shame remains culturally specific and unmediated.

Desire, in Sohail’s rendering, is constitutively pathetic: It produces suffering that exceeds both volition and comprehension. The women in these stories grapple with desire entangled with shame. In one scene, a lonely woman lets a homeless squatter watch her touch herself. This moment allows her to briefly slip free of the self-effacement demanded by her familial duties. “I cannot get married because who will look after my mother if I do?” she reflects later. But what she and the other women in this collection ultimately question is the possibility of a life beyond the mold pressed upon them, first as sister-daughters, then as wife-mothers.

The clinical acuity of Sohail’s prose recalls Annie Ernaux, whom Sohail herself cites as an influence. Like Ernaux, she revisits the same events from multiple vantage points, staging the passage of women through temporal and affective thresholds. I was reminded most of A Man’s Place, where Ernaux’s filial love and disdain coalesce into a paradoxical tenderness toward her father; Sohail, too, investigates the contradictory intensities of attachment to aging parents, staging them as simultaneous sites of pity, resentment, and care.

Grief, particularly anticipatory grief (another pathetic emotion), recurs in Sohail’s work as a disruptive force that unsettles linear temporality. In “The Dog,” for instance, a daughter imagines the life she might have led if her father had not been terminally ill. While her life stands still, her dog’s future moves on, as it is given away to a stranger who might offer the attention she no longer can. Similarly, in “A List of Places My Mother Was Old,” the briefest story in the book, a daughter tallies what the years have taken from her mother through a series of vignettes that move backward and forward, like a stack of fading Polaroids shuffled out of order.

Sohail’s stories culminate quietly; things do not fall apart in a dramatic manner, but the damage is lasting. In most instances, her stories look inward, as if to say: This is ours to bear but not yours to understand. “I should not have to string these scenes up in front of you like this to help you understand that the word loss has a weight that cannot be borne,” one story concludes.

Although Sohail’s dominant mode is realism, the collection is punctuated by moments of formal experimentation: mothers metamorphose into trees, a witch tells a story, a girl is sold into militarized violence. Such surreal ruptures widen the boundaries of genre and stage desperation through a distinctly female sensibility, one that recalls Hélène Cixous’s call for écriture féminine, a writing of excess that resists closure.

This work arrives at an interesting moment in contemporary Pakistani fiction, where questions of nation and diaspora often overwhelm the private and cerebral. What Sohail risks on the page is smaller, more fragile, and braver for it. With wit and empathy, she situates the thoughts of women—the textures of their days, too often dismissed as minor or domestic—as worthy sites of attention. In doing so, Small Scale Sinners reminds us that if literature is pathetic, then at its most vulnerable register, it is also fearless.