Immolation of an Angel

A Biased Review

Immolation of an Angel by Mohammad Sarwar is the first publication of The Metamodern Press. If you’re wondering why this is a “biased review,” it’s because I am The Metamodern Press.

I don’t want to go into what Metamodernism is outside of the fact that Metamodern literature is also known as “the new seriousness.” If we were to compare apples to apples — Sarwar is Pakistani, as is Salman Rushdie — then Sarwar’s novel is much more serious in tone than it anything by Rushdie. You will find some similar themes in each, and you will find aspects of fantasy and magical realism in each, as it is not themes nor these certain aspects of style that separate the postmodern from the metamodern. What matters is the turn from the feeling that you really shouldn’t take any of this seriously (a feeling one certainly feels from Rushdie) to the story being taken very seriously by the author, who hopes the reader will equally take the story seriously.

Storytelling is, after all, a serious endeavor. It’s how we spend most of our days — telling stories, watching stories on TV, reading stories, watching staged stories — and it’s how we communicate what it means to be human. Milan Kundera argued that the novel in particular reminds us of aspects of being which we have forgotten. If that’s the case, what could be more important than storytelling, especially in the style of the novel?

Sarwar tells the story of a man, Jibreel, who immigrated from Pakistan to the United States to become a radiologist…