The Centre

The Centre

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

In this “dazzling” speculative debut, a London-based Pakistani translator furthers her stalled career by attending a mysterious language school that boasts near-instant fluency—but at a secret, sinister cost (Gillian Flynn) Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of “great works of literature,” but mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies and living off her parents’ generous allowance. Adding to her growing sense of inadequacy, her mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, has successfully leveraged his savant-level aptitude for languages into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret.  Adam begrudgingly tells her about The Centre, an elite, invite-only program that guarantees complete fluency in any language, in just ten days. This sounds, to Anisa, like a step toward the life she’s always wanted. Stripped of her belongings and all contact with the outside world, she enrolls and undergoes The Centre’s strange and rigorous processes. But as Anisa enmeshes herself further within the organization, seduced by all that it’s made possible, she soon realizes the hidden cost of its services. By turns darkly comic and surreal, and with twists as page-turning as they are shocking,  The Centre  journeys through Karachi, London, and New Delhi, interro-gating the sticky politics of language, translation, and appropriation along the way. Through Anisa’s addictive tale of striving and self-actualization, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi ultimately asks the reader: What is the real price we pay in our scramble to the center?


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  • Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    Yet another booktok recommendation that I’ve been disappointed with.

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  • Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    2.5 — interesting idea, kind of messy execution (literally and figuratively).

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  • Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

    This read less like a novel and more like the diary of a millennial who just discovered social justice two days ago. The author feels the need to spoon-feed her message to the reader as if she doesn’t trust her audience to understand basic things like “the patriarchy is bad” and “classism hurts people” without a thorough explanation.
    The underlying plot was fine if a bit underdeveloped. The ending felt rushed. Would have loved to read more about linguistics— the passage at the beginning about how to translate “Maman est mort” was interesting.

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