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A review by gardnerhere
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
5.0
Perhaps the most important thing to say is that I started this today and finished it today. Life rarely affords me the opportunity to do such a thing, and when the rare chance arises the novel in hand is rarely compelling enough to make it happen. It happened today.
As such, I'll be processing for a while here, but this novel--the one-sided direct address of a young Pakistani man to his slowly revealed American audience at a table in the streets of Lahore--compels the reader as much as the fictive listener who rises from the table only when the speaker ultimately suggests they depart.
From a middle-distance, I think it's easy to politicize this story of a gifted Pakistani man who feverishly adopts and ultimately rejects American values (particularly capitalist rapacity) on his way toward something like radicalism, but too quickly turning to the political dimensions of this tale undervalues the convincing specificity of Changez' narrative, which is not the story of a Muslim man rejecting Western exceptionalism but the story of a young dude who had his heart smashed by a mysterious and broken young woman.
By centering Changez' crisis around a broken heart rather than ideology, Hamid makes him as much a lovelorn avatar of unrequited love as a radical, and the tangled resulting narrative is as complicated and resistant to blunt-minded interpretations as any life is.
Now watch me go read my third Hamid novel in two weeks.
2/20: And it's maybe a perfect audiobook? As an extended dramatic monologue, the direct address of audio is spot on, and the reader is fabulous.
As such, I'll be processing for a while here, but this novel--the one-sided direct address of a young Pakistani man to his slowly revealed American audience at a table in the streets of Lahore--compels the reader as much as the fictive listener who rises from the table only when the speaker ultimately suggests they depart.
From a middle-distance, I think it's easy to politicize this story of a gifted Pakistani man who feverishly adopts and ultimately rejects American values (particularly capitalist rapacity) on his way toward something like radicalism, but too quickly turning to the political dimensions of this tale undervalues the convincing specificity of Changez' narrative, which is not the story of a Muslim man rejecting Western exceptionalism but the story of a young dude who had his heart smashed by a mysterious and broken young woman.
By centering Changez' crisis around a broken heart rather than ideology, Hamid makes him as much a lovelorn avatar of unrequited love as a radical, and the tangled resulting narrative is as complicated and resistant to blunt-minded interpretations as any life is.
Now watch me go read my third Hamid novel in two weeks.
2/20: And it's maybe a perfect audiobook? As an extended dramatic monologue, the direct address of audio is spot on, and the reader is fabulous.