Readers who have voyeuristically come to expect detailed revelations made for Instagram may find themselves bored by Masud’s hazy retelling, but she is doing something vital by selectively withholding intimate recollections of the violence she experienced ... Masud weaves in poems and excerpts from English literature to tie the disparate strands of her life together and ground the story in history. Initially, this braiding feels fragmented, as if she were trying to fit together pieces from different puzzles. But though these three strands are not necessarily compatible, they do prove complementary ... By its end, Masud has become a master of juxtaposition.
By the end of this sorrowful, tender, sometimes beautiful book, it becomes apparent that it is not those mythic Lahore fields that Masud has been trying to find, but rather a terrestrial analogue for her own sense of desolation.
A Flat Place is a slim volume, but that belies its expansive scope ... [Masud] is intensely curious about the fictional quality of postcolonial characterisations of home and country ... Masud is too clever a writer to offer a straightforward narrative of illness and recovery, in which landscape offers comfort. It would be easy to assume that A Flat Place, dealing as it does in the currency of trauma, racism and exile, is a bleak book. But this memoir is too interested in what it means and feels to be alive in a landscape to be anything other than arresting and memorable.
The complexities of Masud’s highly controlled and abusive childhood are brought into focus from the start but skews dwelling on it, choosing instead to highlight what came after. Her sharp words and mind cut through the chaff of what commonly bloats memoirs ... The structure of A Flat Place is striking, diverging from a conventional methodology ... Her words twist and wrap around various concepts, at times in the same paragraph, challenging the reader to take her work as a whole, rather than pin it down for dissection. The concerns of her work, while innately personal and self-refectory, retain a global scope ... The hauntology that pervades these insights and the book as a whole is heavy but does not overwhelm. These feelings and circumstances continually drive her back into the wilderness, the flat plains, in order to work through them. It is only in all of these spaces she can process and connect to that which is the most broken. This combines as a challenge to the reader, although Masud is not intentionally issuing one.
