SOURCE: Hashmi, Alamgir. Review of A New History of Torments, by Zulfikar Ghose. World Literature Today 58, no. 1 (winter 1984): 167-68.

In the following review, Hashmi focuses on the symbolic elements in A New History of Torments and praises Ghose's imaginative poetic prose.

Extracting elaborate narratives out of cunning riddles is a “fabulous” device. Zulfikar Ghose states that the title of the novel A New History of Torments was suggested by a poem by Pablo Neruda and that the titles of the two sections into which the novel is divided “are the two phrases in the penultimate line” in another poem by Neruda. These two section titles, “The Sealed Light” and “The Dead Labyrinth,” are reechoed by short verse quotations from T. S. Eliot and César Vallejo.

Set in contemporary South America, the novel exploits the resources of the story in multiple directions to elicit from the land a...