Books are supposed to challenge us, right?

You know you're in for a long ride when the novel you're reading has a Wikipedia entry for the characters alone. I've printed it out, along with two other study guides to the book, so reading is a physical challenge too -- keeping all those papers handy and flipping through them to find the exact piece of info you need to understand what's going on in the story. (Like whose sister married which brother of what main character?)

The characters' names aren't identifiably male or female, nor are they identifiably first or last names; a son's name doesn't always have anything in common with his father's or mother's names (ditto for daughters of course); married people don't always share a name. Plus the narrator moves back and forth between decades, talking about his grandfather as a young man (about 1919 in Kashmir and other places in India) in one paragraph and his father as a young man in the next (1940s India). I think. I'm determined to finish it, but I know I'm missing a lot.

The guides and cheat-sheets for the characters are helpful but even they are confusing. One of them tells the story and keeps referring to "Pakistan." But the main action takes place when there was no official Pakistan, which kind of sets my teeth on edge. Did you know that the name Pakistan was created in 1933? I didn't.

The name was coined by Cambridge student and Muslim nationalist Choudhary Rahmat Ali, and was published on January 28, 1933 in the pamphlet Now or Never. He saw it as an acronym formed from the names of the "homelands" of Muslims in northwest India — P for Punjab, A for the Afghan areas of the region, K for Kashmir, S for Sindh and tan for Balochistan, thus forming "Pakstan". An i was later added to the English rendition of the name to ease pronunciation, producing "Pakistan"

From YahooAnswers.