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A review by coronaurora
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
4.0
This brought a smile to my face. A novella that is actually a fictional autobiography of an eponymous small-town peasant who builds himself a mini bottled water empire in an eponymous South Asian country, I found it tender, concerned and reliably informed about the milieu it talked from. There is a touching thread of an unconsummated love affair that almost survives the torrents of lives lived by the protagonist and his first love as they both exclusively chase their individual American dream in a big megapolis checking each of its trappings: the obligatory marriage and kid, the expanding business, the enveloping heart disease, the scams, the violence from those begrudging their money, and this somewhat-cinematic, almost-unbelievable rope of co-incidence imparts this otherwise distant book a welcome tenderness.
At barely 200 pages, the second person telling shoulders the leaps in year well and manages to keep you invested. In retrospect the casual telling of whole years in a few lines of prose befits a life lived chasing the materialistic objects and dubious social ephemeralities like "status" and "connections" which are the life-blood of social fabric in such countries.
Sharing its tone, themes and sentiments with the more voluminous Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire published coincidentally in the same year, Hamid with his smaller canvas peopled with fewer characters achieves a similar concoction of sociological snapshot, decade-long sweep with principal characters in convincing mortal peril and sporting an identifiable contemplative mood cherry-topped with wry sense of humour. It shares with Aw's book much of its cleverness too, not least the ungainly title, the ironic Self Help Money Making chapter titles (Aw wrote for us whole self-help chapters), and like Aw's book, here too, it's the masterful offsetting of the self-reflexiveness and other literary tropes with genuine concern for the world state and some head-bending, heart-rending turns of phrase that make this a triumph.
At barely 200 pages, the second person telling shoulders the leaps in year well and manages to keep you invested. In retrospect the casual telling of whole years in a few lines of prose befits a life lived chasing the materialistic objects and dubious social ephemeralities like "status" and "connections" which are the life-blood of social fabric in such countries.
Sharing its tone, themes and sentiments with the more voluminous Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire published coincidentally in the same year, Hamid with his smaller canvas peopled with fewer characters achieves a similar concoction of sociological snapshot, decade-long sweep with principal characters in convincing mortal peril and sporting an identifiable contemplative mood cherry-topped with wry sense of humour. It shares with Aw's book much of its cleverness too, not least the ungainly title, the ironic Self Help Money Making chapter titles (Aw wrote for us whole self-help chapters), and like Aw's book, here too, it's the masterful offsetting of the self-reflexiveness and other literary tropes with genuine concern for the world state and some head-bending, heart-rending turns of phrase that make this a triumph.