The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mohsin HamidNarrator: Satya Bhabha
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Published: 2007-04-03
ISBN: 1602831777
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America
Book Reviews of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Book Review: A global story about the American dream, beautifully told, in imagery as spare as a desert evening
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is the story of a highly intelligent, emotionally sensitive young man, a New York financial analyst, who has a life-changing realization while on an assignment in Chile (where, as I recall, they had their own 9/11 in 1973). The realization--or epiphany or moment of truth which the young man comes to--reaches him for many reasons as it could in anyone's life. But this young Pakistani man--top of his Princeton University class--found his ideal employment with an American company, and he fit right in. His college life, followed quickly by the right job, was the fulfillment of a dream. Simple it seems, but you must read this novel to get the nuances, the buildup of tension. It's not sound-bite reading for those who cherry-pick literary fiction. Of course, if the setting is a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan, then you can guess that the young man, the narrator named Changez, lost his job. But "how" he lost his job is the American story. In many ways 9/11/01 is a "pretext" for this novel because this story could have happened at any time in recent world history; the story of failed dreams has been told by Thomas Hardy, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many more novelists.
The Pakistani narrator is such a sensitive person that it's difficult not to think of him as also being the author, Mohsin Hamid. I feel that to write this novel a person has to have lived it. His sensitivity to the amount of flesh American women expose is profoundly touching as is his anguish over the fate of his family in Pakistan.
Regarding the craft of writing: Every scene is turned gently. The fine points and nuances are so clearly realized. There are moments of pointed irony in this novel that make it truly stunning. If the American reader cannot read irony, then we are indeed a lost civilization; if we can't detect irony than it means our attention span is so short that we can't trace an idea over time and space. One example would be the financial corporation's motto, "Focus on the fundamentals," and how the notion of fundamentals resonates from the book's title through all the interpretations of what "fundamental" can mean and to whom.
Also, after this novel, no teacher of writing can tell his or her students to "show the reader, don't tell" for, with this novel, telling is showing. What hurts most poignantly--for me--about Hamid's novel is the horrible truth I experienced when I realized that my fellow American, a soldier, could sit at a cafe table, ostensibly listening to the soul-searching of a sensitive, well-meaning young man and not feel anything. That is the final implication: that there are people who feel nothing even when a well-spoken person bares the core of his life, and braves fear and paranoia to tell it so well.
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