London-based Anisa is a translator\u2014she provides subtitles for Bollywood movies\u2014but dreams of translating great works of literature. Her spare time is spent hanging out, talking politics, and complaining about her rather useless white boyfriend, Adam, himself a highly successful translator. In fact, on a trip with Anisa to visit her family in Karachi, Adam reveals that he\u2019s also become fluent in Urdu, speaking it better than Anise. Anise goes into a tailspin. \u201cThis is shady as fuck.\u201d There\u2019s no way that Adam could become that fluent in years, never mind days. When she presses him for details, he lets her in on the Centre, where after thousands of dollars and ten days of study\u2014living there, avoiding all contact with others, and listening only to your chosen language\u2014you emerge completely fluent.<\/p>\n
Skeptical but eager to give it a try, Anisa enters the Centre to learn German\u2014and indeed, after several days of study she has a breakthrough. Along the way, she becomes close to Shiba, who manages the Centre and whose father was one of four men who, while Oxford students, developed this radical approach to language learning. But how radical is it? On a trip to New Delhi with Shiba, Anisa finally learns how the Centre works\u2014and the discovery is shocking.This is a debut, but Siddiqi writes like a pro, slowly building the character of Anisa, so that when the big reveal is made, it\u2019s all the more meaningful.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" London-based Anisa is a translator\u2014she provides subtitles for Bollywood movies\u2014but dreams of translating great works of literature. Her spare time is spent hanging out, talking politics, and complaining about her…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[116,115,113,114,112,50],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-21st-century","tag-england","tag-feminist","tag-pakistan","tag-satire","tag-suspense"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/The-Center-400x400.jpg","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/The-Center.jpg","author_info":{"display_name":"Brian Kenney","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}