Mohsin Hamid Å 1 SUMMARY
The elegant and compelling novel about a Pakistani man’s abandonment of his high-flying life in New York??—??an extraordinary portrait of a divided and yet ultimately indivisible world in America post-9/11.
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. He begins to tell the story of a man named Changez, who is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Although this book is set in Pakistan, it is not translated. The author attended Princeton and Harvard Law School, living a life like that of his protagonist, so I guess we can call this story semi-autobiographical.
The story is told by a young Pakistani man to an American in an extended dialog while they sit in a street cafe in Lahore. The young man tells the stranger his story of attending Princeton and then getting a high-powered job as a financial analyst at a company that gathers information for impending corporate takeovers. So he was a budding ‘master of the universe.’
As the young man relates his experiences as a student at an American Ivy League college, we are reminded that the vast majority of international students in the US were not starving kids from rural villages. They were members of the elite in their home countries and already familiar with English and with western ways when they arrived. We learn of the advantages and disadvantages of students in this situation: the prejudices as well as the friendships that come from him being an ‘exotic friend.’
His family is back in Pakistan where he grew up with multiple maids and cooks and a chauffeur. It's a bit of a stretch for us to sympathize with his concern that yes, they are rich, but through the generations his ancestors have slipped down the Pakistani class ladder. It's hard to sympathize as he tells us basically that they used to be the equivalent of billionaires but have slipped to being just millionaires.
He meets a young American woman on a class vacation trip to the Greek Isles. They kind of fall in love but she has some serious psychological problems.
The American in Pakistan is portrayed as a stereotype. A big burly world-weary guy wearing a suit and obviously in some type of security or intelligence role because we learn from hints that he's carrying a weapon inside his jacket.
During the conversation we learn a bit about the local culture and what it's like to be served at a street café - the different teas, foods and drinks. We see how the plaza changes as the chaotic street traffic ends at sunset when it is closed off to vehicles and becomes a pedestrian-only venue decorated with multi-colored lights. (Something some US downtowns should try?)
We wonder how the American has the patience to listen to this day-long story. I don’t mean that comment to imply that this book is boring in any way – it’s reasonably fast-paced. We watch the American’s reactions which are sometimes disbelief, disgust and revulsion.
As the young man is mentored in his job by a vice president, we get a case study of how the old boy network still works. His boss, also a Princeton grad, sees in the Pakistani man a hunger that he also had as a youth, coming from lower class origins. “I never let on that I felt like I didn't belong to this world. Just like you.” And we learn there are other reasons he might be interested in the young man.
Then we learn how his world changed after 9/11 and what led to his return to Pakistan.
The author (b. 1971) is well known for two other books I have read and reviewed – Exit West and Moth Smoke. The author lived a life like his protagonist. He lived in the US for several years as a child while his father attended Stanford. He returned for Princeton and Harvard and became a high-powered financial consultant, later moving to London where he became a British citizen. Now he and his family divide their time among London, Lahore and New York.
Geography note: With more than 11 million people, Lahore is the second-largest city in Pakistan, after Karachi with 15 million. Islamabad, with about 1 million, is the capital.
Top photo of street scene is Lahore from r/AccidentalRenaissance on reddit.com
Map from Infoplease.com (Lahore is in east central, adjacent to India)
Lahore from pinterest.com
The author from thebookerprizes.com
English A real bowl of literary prawn crackers - you eat and eat and they taste of nothing, they're entirely synthetic, like a form of extruded plastic, but you can't stop and then you realise the whole bowl is gone and what was that all about? This is not a good book and yet it was compelling, I can't deny it, a smooth, snaky insinuating monologue which in retrospect and often in real-time spect is a ridiculous tissue of allegory, you've seen all this in other reviews but it's all horribly true - our reluctant hero's name is Changez - that's right
Ch-ch-ch-changez to you!
and his svelte not-quite-attainable lurve is (Am) Erica
I hope Mohsin Hamid wakes up in hot sweats in the middle of the night thinking Oh God, how could I have done that!
The fundamentalism of the title is from the business slogan of the arbitrage company he works for in New York, focus on the fundamentals - that's the fundamentalism he's reluctant about. Okay, nice joke.
That said, a lot of the reviews of this book would have you believe it's an apology for al Qaeda - no, it's not, Changez is an extraordinarily secular Muslim - I think the M word is used once only in the whole book, and nowhere does he speak of Islam. The opposition to America which is eventually accepted and embodied by our troubled young man is entirely political - he does give a faint but pertinent impression of America as the lover who kills you or as the murderer who loves you. But oh dear, this kind of thing is not good :
I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country's constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable. Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan ...
I thought there was so much more to be said about how the East wants what the West has got without wanting to be colonised and disembowelled by the West, and how America is the very embodiment of guilty pleasure, and how this love hate thing is like to drive entire countryfuls of young men raving mad, given the repressive anti-sex poverty-stricken societies they come from, and how this explains a whole lot, but Hamsid's touch was so light you could almost have mistaken it for shallowness.
Two and a half. English I've been trying to read some good Pakistani writing in English for a while now. And I'm glad I made an introduction with Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, who earlier wrote Moth Smoke, a novel, which Rahul Bose is now adapting into a film.
Lately, there has been a flowering of young Pakistani writers like Hamid and Kamila Shamsie (Cartography, Salt And Saffron), and in many ways, this is the first literary stirring that the country is witnessing.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist looks at the increasingly volatile and precariously balanced relationship between the West (United States) and East (South Asian Muslim countries), and how without a certain sense empathy, this equation will steadily spiral downwards.
Interestingly, Hamid’s point here is that a feeling of fundamentalism can arise in the unlikeliest of people, when they feel pushed to a corner.
The novel’s protagonist, Changez is a Princeton graduate, has led a charmed life back in Pakistan and is all set for a enviable career in New York.
He bags a job with one of the premium companies of the city, Underwood Samson and in a short while, is recogonised as one of the firm’s brightest young talents.
If he thought life couldn't get better, he’s proved wrong. Soon enough, he falls in love with Erica, a rich, pretty and artistically inclined American girl. But this relationship is fraught with troubles. Though there is a great deal of affection and even curiosity between Changez and Erica about their respective backgrounds, theirs remains a largely unfulfilling bond. Erica cannot get over Chris, her boyfriend who died some years back and thereby, can never fully 'open up' (sexually too) with Changez. In a moment of frustration and even resentment, the latter asks her to imagine him as Chris and make love.
This is when you realize that Hamid’s constructed an allegory here. Erica stands for America (Erica), and symbolises the deep infactuation Changez feels for her on certain levels. His own company is called Underwood Sampsons, standing for US, a highly competitive firm with a narrow focus on its own progress.
Erica's inability to accept Changez, unless he 'becomes' Chris, quite clearly, hints at the country's unwillingness to accept the former’s identity for what it primarily is.
Till this point, Changez largely shares a love-hate equation with the US. He loves being a New Yorker, both his high-flying job and girlfriend fill his heart with a sense of pride. However, at the same time, Hamid's protagonist is no pushover. Clearly, Changez has a mind of his own and feels a deep sense of attachment to his motherland (Pakistan). The fact that bright minds like him have to desert their own country, to fill the coffers of an already overdeveloped, supercilious country, leaves him frustrated.
This realisation further dawns upon him when 9/11 occurs and Changez feels a strange sense of thrill at 'someone bringing America to its knees'. From there on, life is never the same and his disenchantment with America is complete.
Erica is afflicted with a mental illness and slowly fades away (literally) from his life. This is a period when Changez also develops a certain rebellious streak, refusing to either cut off his beard or focus on his job. News of America's attacks on Afghanistan, Pakistan's closest neighbour fills his heart with resentment and from there on, it's only a matter of time before he loses his job.
Once back in Pakistan, Changez becomes a professor at a University, 'who makes it his mission on the campus to advocate Pakistan's disengagement with America'
Though the book does not, in any way, glorify fundamentalism, it subtly points at how sparks of fundamentalism can be ignited in the most placid looking people and circumstances. Hamid succeeds in making his central character-Changez engaging from the word go and it helps that this book is a rather compact, slim one, without too much rambling.
But, while Hamid's attempt at constructing an allegorical narrative is interesting, it is hardly intrusive enough to lend the story any kind of depth. If anything, it slackens its dramatic pace, making it both tedious and essayist.
On the other hand, Changez's professional life has been treated with great flair and understanding.
There are great stories to be written on the increasing east-west gulf and the growing feelings of mistrust between both continents. The Reluctant Fundamentalist only skims the surface, but nevertheless Hamid does enough to prove that he's a writer to watch out for.
English
In one sustained monologue, a young Pakistani named Changez relates his life story to an unidentified American man in a cafe in the city of Lahore. Changez, a Princeton graduate who once worked as an analyst for a Manhattan financial firm, tells us how his optimistic view of America began to darken in the aftermath of 9/11.
I liked this book for its elegant style and outsider's viewpoint, but my favorite part of it is the mysterious relationship between the narrator and his American listener. Tension and threat bubble beneath the novel's polite surface, and the possible explanations for that tension keep the reader guessing and give the novel sublety, power and depth. English This is a lovely, short, very easy-to-read post 9/11 book.
The structure of this is tale is Changez telling his personal story to a burly American visitor (probably a spook of some sort) to his country, in his function as a guide to Pakistan. The tone was very reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling, at least as far as I recall from my reading of Kipling many years back. Think The Man Who Would Be King. This makes sense given the subject matter of the book, colonialism versus the third world.
Changez, born to fading gentry in Pakistan, has attended Princeton on scholarship, gotten a lucrative job with a top tier financial company, and is in love with beautiful, blond upper-class Yank. Life is good. But when 9/11 happens he discovers that he feels some satisfaction in the great giant being taken down a notch. In the newly paranoid USA, his background marks him as a threat to many and life changes.
Essentially what we have here is a foreigner (Changez) falling in love with America (get it? amERICA), but his amERICA is too damaged by the premature loss of her boyfriend to cancer at age 22 (Read Vietnam or whatever other fall one might choose) to cope. The result of this is that amERICA suffers from extreme nostalgia and becomes incapable of truly embracing Changez (subtle).
Erica’s father irks him with presumptions about corruption in Pakistan. He sees a “typically American undercurrent of condescension” (p 55) American indifference to third world concerns is noted repeatedly here. It is no secret that the USA is notoriously unempathetic to the concerns of others since the Marshall Plan.
Fundamentals here are the tools taught him in his finance career (efficiency). Fundamentals are implied for other things, knowing who you are, what your place is in the world. There are, surprisingly, no overt connections made to religious fundamentalism. Presumably one of the author’s points is that the values held high in the west (efficiency uber alles) are just as unfeeling and extreme as those of the religious nuts.
I did not take this as a personal tale. It is a metaphoric one. I mean the main character has but a single name, Changez. For that alone, how could the book be anything other than metaphorical? So I was not troubled by the contradictions in the character. For example, Changez feels an affinity with the jeepney driver in the Philippines, yet the choices he makes are all to strive within the western world. He manages to get a scholarship to attend Princeton, but feels it necessary to hide his relative poverty. What? Are there no other scholarship kids at Princeton? He is elitist in his orientation, wanting to hang with the rich kids, wanting to work for the heavy hitter financial company, even after it becomes clear to him that the work will cost people their livelihoods, wanting to be with the crazy girl when it is clear that she is over the edge. It is not America that rejects the foreigner here, but the foreigner who rejects America. So it is not a personal tale. It is a metaphoric one. It would have been better had the walking symbols here been made more reasonable, had their desires and impulses been a little more grounded in flesh and blood reality.
You’re not a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Hamid's personal, FB, twitter pages
English
An Open Letter to America
which unfortunately I read late, around 5 years late. Why unfortunate? B’coz I might have liked it or probably loved it since I was a naive reader back then i.e I was into Sheldons and Archers and closer home Bhagats *blushes*. Anyway, I was well aware when this book hit the literary world and took it by storm. A dashing title, a Pakistani author, a reluctant subject, a movie in the making by Mira Nair and that’s precisely the reason I wanted to read the book before watching the movie , so bought a copy and was yayyyy...finally! Great read it’s gonna be!!
1st page: ok.
2nd page: yeah okk.
3rd page: Ahan! I know where you are heading.
50th page: err..no, I don’t know where you are heading, but I sense a twist just around the corner.
100th page: A love story..,girl’s lover dead...can’t forget him...a clinic...I once had a girl...Norwegian wood…Yes! Yes!...No! OK.
183rd page: just few more lines and then contact Agent J a.k.a. Will Smith and request for the memory eraser toy and move on to your next Murakami read.
And Nooo!! (Kindly excuse the superlatives) I didn’t hate this book but hated the fact as to why I wasn’t able to appreciate it in any way possible. It made me uncomfortable throughout rather than excited and the most irritating part is that you are compelled to read it till the end in the hope of getting hold of the whole idea behind this book. At the end, the author hurled a very smart curve ball towards his readers, leaving most of us in dilemmas, some on the side of Changez (the protagonist), some on the side of Mr. America (envying that delectable Lahori food he had) and some wishing to watch the re-run of 2011 epic cricket world cup semi-final between India and Pakistan and marveling at its brilliance and that moment when..Aargh! I never knew writing the review would be a similar experience like that of reading this book..distracting!!
This is the second book I read by a Pakistani author, first being My Feudal Lord by Tehmina Durrani, which I judged on the basis of its subject and not on writing style and since I read it around 6 years ago, all I could recall was that it was simple but affected me enough to evoke emotions of empathy which might not hold true at present having read many great books and becoming more aware and objective about the world around me since then so it might not feature in the league of extra ordinary but it definitely left an impression which reluctant fundamentalist, as I highly doubt would be able to achieve. As the story was unfolding it became, hardly audible and incredibly distant. And the writing style!! I wish the narration was in one to one style as it started bothering me after few chapters, may be the execution was unconvincing or plain dull *oxymoron*.
This book has some great ideas but somehow fell short of the elements that would have made it a great page turner. It felt too safe and too confined for my taste. Islamic Fundamentalism is a sensitive subject and needs to be handled carefully without actually conveying any negative message or an ambiguous one but what Mohsin Hamid as seemed, resisted from going out of his comfort zone and stating everything at a superficial level without actually diving deep.
The only thing I found acceptable was his realization of being victimized or prone to victimization because “I am a Muslim”, but like I stated that I read it a bit late so in today’s time this has become a bit redundant and again not helping in scoring brownie points for Mr. Hamid.
Those stars are simply because as a writer he definitely has potential provided he let himself go of all the inhibitions if he’s having any, from his literary genes. English An eerie, quietly powerful story. The structure is simple enough--- a monologue. A cafe in Lahore, and a young Pakistani is explaining to a silent American how he came to be an enemy of America. There's menace there--- something is about to happen, and soon. You're not told why the American is there, or what he does, or quite why young Changez is telling him these things. But there it is. This voice--- educated, articulate, tinged with hostility and faux-bonhomie and self-pity ---speaking into the dusk, ordering more tea, and...waiting.
There are reviewers at GoodReads who just didn't get the narrator, who just disliked him out of hand. After all, they said--- full scholarship to Princeton, near-six-figure Wall Street job at 22, beautiful American girlfriend: how dare he dislike America? I just kept reading and thinking about Dostoyevsky's Devils or Conrad's Under Western Eyes. Changez would be...exactly...the sort to end up a terrorist of some kind. From a family with old name and status but no money. Educated someplace where you're almost never aware of being different, where suddenly money is an issue, where status and formalized deference don't soften the edges of not having money. A job with travel to places where you're aware of being American in the eyes of locals, but being a mere foreigner to American customs officials. Being smitten with a beautiful, gentle Upper East Side girl who slips away from you. Changez turns on the TV in a Manila hotel suite and sees the Towers burning on 11 September 2001 and finds himself suddenly, unexpectedly...smiling. However not? You can see Changez being as surprised as any of his American employers and friends at just how much resentment is there. Just the sort of person who could be recruited, who'd find himself seeking out places where he could open up his anger.
There's no grand political justification here, no sudden acceptance of Islam or jihad. Changez is secular, and his disdain for Americans isn't religious as much it is based on tribe and class and a sense of falling between identities. Mohsin Hamid gives his narrator a disturbing and quiet sense of slowly growing bitterness and isolation, as well as a slowly growing desperation about finding an identity. I am a Kurtz, he tells his nameless American listener, waiting for my Marlowe.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an unexpected find, and a story with a whole cast of ghosts and ideas happening just behind the main narrative. Very much worth reading, and a book where you'll be uncovering layers in Changez's monologue for a long time.
English One of the most contentiously rated novels I've seen here
I'd had the book for 2-3 years probably, when, a couple months ago, I determined that I needed to make shelf space. This was one of a few books I decided to get rid of, even though it was unread. But it was so short, and I had looked forward to reading it ...
So I put it beside books I was reading and would soon read, then picked it up a few nights ago when I was tired but didn't feel like going to bed, and started reading. I’m very glad I did.
As soon as I'd read a couple pages I was interested. Can't recall reading a story in this narrative style. It's all in the first person, the words are being spoken by the narrator, Changez, to an American man, never named, whose apparently only occasional words are never explicitly heard, simply acknowledged in the narration by something like,
Oh, but you mustn't assume that I believed that, sir. or What's that you say, sir? You'd like something to drink? How would some nice tea do for you? Fine, I'd like a cup too, I'll order for us.
The entire almost one-sided conversation takes place over the course of several hours, from mid-afternoon perhaps to late at night. In it, the Pakistani narrator tells a select story of his life, his experiences going to Princeton, being hired by a small, select financial company in Manhattan, and meeting and falling for a young American woman named Erica.
The story of Changez and Erica is very strange, doubly strange when folded into this sort of narrative style. I think I'll remember it for quite a while.
but all those contentious reviews ...
I'm sure the low ratings of many have nothing to do with the literary merits of the novel. They have to do with the attitudes toward America that Changez slowly reveals throughout his telling, attitudes which in fact he only becomes aware of as certain incidents occur which evoke (as he tells it) surprise on his own part, when he realizes how he has reacted. I don't believe I'll go into any specifics about this, but I found his recounting of these attitudes very believable from the point of view of a person from that part of the world.
The story is something of a mystery – a mystery with at least two, perhaps more, ominous threads which slowly are revealed and slowly grow darker.
You may dislike the narrator (I didn’t), but that doesn’t seem to be the point anyway, to me. And, even if the author himself is taken as having the same attitudes as the narrator does, well, to dislike the story because one dislikes the author doesn’t seem to be a way of judging literature either.
And it is literature, not a political essay. In many ways, for many reasons, an unforgettable novel.
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Previous library review: Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
Next library review: Dune English Generally,I'm a bit wary of Booker nominees,but in this case they got it right.It would have been a lot better if this book had actually won the Booker Prize,instead of merely being shortlisted.
However,the nomination generated quite a buzz,and introduced me to Mohsin Hamid.And oh boy,his first two books were very impressive.
I read it in one sitting,a short and very interesting book,which held my interest from the very first page to the last.It explores a young Pakistani man's drift into extremism,after he has spent a good part of his life studying and working in the US.
There is one thing though,the protagonist Changez,doesn't really appear the type to become a fundamentalist,so suddenly,as 9/11 happens.He has a good job and is well settled in the US.
However,the book reminded me of the real life case of Faisal Shehzad,a Pakistani man who was arrested in the US in 2010 for trying to blow something up.But Faisal Shehzad was struggling with his job and had already become radicalized.
With this book,Mohsin Hamid took a gamble.It could easily have flopped,given the sensitivity of the subject and the anti Muslim feeling in the West,following 9/11 and the actions of the hijackers.Instead,it became a bestseller.
It is a fascinating book,one which also depicts the dilemmas of those caught between two worlds,the East and the West.They don't quite fit in either world.
It is just too bad that after this book,the quality of Mohsin Hamid's writing went downhill,as far as I am concerned. English “Have you heard of the janissaries?”... “They were Christian boys,” he explained, “captured by the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in a Muslim army, at that time the greatest army in the world. They were ferocious and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they had nothing else to turn to.”... “The janissaries were always taken in childhood. It would have been far more difficult to devote themselves to their adopted empire, you see, if they had memories they could not forget.”
I spent that night considering what I had become. There really could be no doubt: I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn!
Mohsin Hamid here, gives an inside of the dilemma Muslims felt in post 9/11 America, which was everything but safe for them. He has written about the growing islamophobia, racism and prejudice that still reside there, with his own unique narrative style that captures his readers attention and compel them to read till they finish the book. Absolutely brilliant. English
