Hamid's second book (after Moth Smoke) is an intelligent and absorbing 9/11 novel, written from the perspective of Changez, a young Pakistani whose sympathies, despite his fervid immigrant embrace of America, lie with the attackers.
We read on to see what he will reveal, increasingly certain that he will also conceal.
Everything we know comes to us by his voice, by turns emotionally raw, teasingly ambiguous, fawning and tinged with menace.
It's a testament to author Mohsin Hamid's skill that Changez, despite this cold-blooded admission, remains a partly sympathetic character. Hamid has done something extraordinary with this novel, and for those who want a different voice, a different view of the aftermath of 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is well worth reading. Are we sitting across from Changez at a table in Lahore, joining him in a sumptuous dinner? Do his comments cause us to bristle, making us more and more uncomfortable? Extreme times call for extreme reactions, extreme writing. The monologue form allows for an intimate conversation, as the reader and the American listener become one. The courage of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is in the telling of a story about a Pakistani man who makes it and then throws it away because he doesn't want it anymore, because he realizes that making it in America is not what he thought it was or what it used to be. Karen Olsson - New York Times Book Review For to be an American, he declares, is to view the world in a certain way-a perspective he absorbed in his eagerness to join the country's elite. His resentment is at least in part self-loathing, directed at the American he'd been on his way to becoming. But Hamid's novel, while it contains a few such moments, is distinguished by its portrayal of Changez's class aspirations and inner struggle. A less sophisticated author might have told a one-note story in which an immigrant's experiences of discrimination and ignorance cause his alienation. That monologue is the substance of Hamid's elegant and chilling little novel. Changez happens upon the American in Lahore, invites him to tea and tells him the story of his life in the months just before and after the attacks.
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