Could have been so much more
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a short work - perhaps straying into the novella category - that takes the form of one side of a conversation over a Pakistani café table between a man, Changez, and an unvoiced American stranger.
Changez recites his life story - brought up in a family of fading wealth in Pakistan, studying with a prestigious scholarship at Princeton University, and working for a high-paying financial services company - Underwood Samson - in New York. Changez receives praise and opportunity as a reward for his brilliance until world events - the attacks on the World Trade Center and subsequent was and tension in Afghanistan and Pakistan lead him to disillusionment with the west. All this is juxtaposed with advice to the American stranger on menu choices and assurances of good intentions.
The trouble is, the novel lacks any real depth or substance. The narrative technique of interspersing straight biography with casual conversation started to get irritating and was, I suspect, a device to add bulk and texture to a thin narrative. The narrative, too, didn't last long enough to explain how a man who had embraced Mammon with such enthusiasm should, over the space of a fortnight, be prepared to toss it all in for a life of uncertainty back in Pakistan. It's not that such a change of heart is impossible, but it is unlikely enough to require some pretty deep explanation which was not on offer here.
And the ending, when it comes, is so ambiguous that it simply frustrates. Apparently Changez brought the USA to standstill - but without a plausible explanation of how he did it. And the encounter with the American is left hanging. How did the conversation end? Perhaps this was intended to add to the literary effect, but one wonders whether it was a case that Hamid had developed a storyline so far and didn't know how to resolve it.
This is an easy, fast read and is not without some merits. The novel does cause one to question - briefly - how Muslims have been supposed to relate to the USA and its foreign policy in recent years. The title, too, raises a smile. The financial institution is supposed to have an ethos of concentrating on the fundamentals, and as Changez decides the world of high finance is not for him, he becomes a sort of reluctant fundamentalist in one sense and, perhaps, a more willing Fundamentalist in another sense. But overall, one is left feeling that the work could have been so much more with twice the number of pages and without the irritating mono-dialogue.
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BIG disappointment
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The title of the book and the front cover picture are somewhat deceptive. I kept waiting for the book to get interesting and deal with the issues I expected it would, but it never did. The story is about a Pakistani man who has a thing for some crazy suicidal American girl, and its basically him sat talking about her for the whole story. I hated the style it was written in. I thought to myself if someone came up to me in a restaurant and started talking like that for hours and hours I would get up and leave. How this book won a prize is beyond me. I was expecting a story about a man who was drawn into a more extreme form of Islam reluctantly. If thats what you are looking for them look elsewhere. If you want a story about a Muslim pakistani who couldnt care less about religion, and only wants to focus of sleeping with a pretty American girl (with little success) then this is the story for you. Oh, and that picture of the author in the back of the book is so annoying. How dare you smile so broadly knowing that you have cheated me out of £8? I will not buy another one of your books again. AAArrrggghhh.
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Subtle Fundamentalism
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It's difficult to describe a novel written in the form of a monologue as a thriller, but this is how it's being marketed. As the other reviews will show (and their mixed ratings) this is a far from conventional read and you won't find any classic "thriller" territory here.
That said, there is much in this which is gripping. Ostensibly, the plot is that a Pakistani man, Changez, spots an American in Lahore and starts talking to him. He ends up telling him about his life in America as a way of reassuring him that he's not someone to be afraid of and through recounting his experiences particularly after 9/11, he explains how his resentment of America developed. What grows is a portrait of how the American response to 9/11 affected and alienated Asian nationals resident in the US.
I found this profoundly but subtly moving. I was kept reading by the need to understand why Changez was back in Lahore and the increasing curiosity about his unnamed companion. This is an important read for people interested in current developments across the world; it's not about radicalism but how subtly people can be turned to more fundamental stances and how conterproductive big sweeping responses to terrorism can be.
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Fundamentally bad
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Much expectation, if only because of the whizzo title and barrels of praise from the respectable end of the US and UK press.
Even the title is a misnomer, alas: the narrator-hero is no fundamentalist, just a rich young chap from Lahore who gets a bit miffed at being body-searched at airports (so?) or looked at suspiciously post-9/11 in his adopted country (the States), and grows a beard in protest. It's really the dullest of memoirs, and about as controversial as a wet sparkler: no discussion of the treatment of women in Pakistan, for instance, let alone any rejoicing at 9/11 - just a sort of mild version of some of the more innocuous entries on the Guardian website's blog. And we are supposed to believe that he is telling all this to an American outside a Lahore restaurant - including details of his (flaccid) sex life. One of the basic precepts of fiction is that we believe in the narrative premise, even if the action takes place on Mars; it's what makes writing novels so damn hard.
This book is a fraud perpetrated by the laughable bookselling industry. Yet it's been at least shortlisted for every prize that moves. What more can one say?
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Fundamentally flawed...
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A very disappointing novel. I was looking forward to reading it because it had quite a few mentions in the media, presumably down to the Zeitgeisty, potentially controversial subject matter. Certainly letting slip that the protagonist felt jubilant about 9/11 is going to guarantee you a few plugs. However I didn't find it a lot of fun to read. The conceit of making it a monologue with an unheard interlocutor at a restaurant table just seemed pretentious, and resulted in some clumsy one-sided phrasing that reminded me of a desperate ventriloquist.
The story itself had the potential to be a fascinating study of East-West relations, of change, of loss, of cross-cultural affairs and friendships. But that was all undermined by the writing, which laboured points dreadfully (think of the many significant hand gestures of Changez's boss, or the alternative implications of "fundamentals") and used right-on versions of stereotypes (troubled rich girl, macho captain of industry who turns out to be gay, nostalgic glimpses of harmonious family life in the Old Country). The result is that the reader is left with no sense of the process and outcomes of change, just an overpowering impression of a political axe being ground.
The author's wry smile in the large photo on the back endpaper was the final straw! I felt he knew that, in my wasting an afternoon reading this, he had played a successful joke on me.
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