World Literature

Udas Naslain

By

Abdullah Hussain

A beautiful Novel By Abdullah Hussain Udas Naslain.
He said that:
“In his novel Udas Naslain his work, was critical of those who accord primacy to the craft over creativity. “Creativity is a mysterious, indescribable phenomenon, ” he said.

Talking about his novel Udas Naslain, for instance, he recalled that the idea for the story had flashed in a moment of nothingness. “I was working at a cement factory in a desolate place where I would spend eight hours at the office, another eight in bed, but had nothing to do with the remaining eight. It was out of sheer boredom that I picked up the pen one day and started scribbling, trying to see if I had a story to tell, ” he said.

It was then that the whole novel flashed through his mind and later the characters “ran away with the story and I was left to do all the research and legwork to satisfy them.” He named a few other stories that “got themselves written by me.”

Though Abdullah Hussain acknowledged that the creative experience differs from writer to writer, he insisted that the classics that have survived the vagaries of time were based on creativity and not craft. How many of the current craft-based productions of young writers survive the test of time is something that, he said, would one day decide the debate