Excellent disturbing read
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This book is beautifully written. The words are chosen with care and this is consistent with the fact that the narrator - although had a privileged anglophile upbringing - is not English mother-tongue. However there are some annoying - if not disturbing - profiles. The narrator (or the author?) although proclaims his annoyance by American people's superiority complex, seems sometimes affected by the same problem: a badly concealed superiority complex towards Western people's supposed grossness...Although annoying, this is a beautifully written book, and the pace is fast....I recommend it
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Interesting and quick read
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I really enjoyed this book. I got so quickly swept away by the narrative that the book flew by.
Changez is the narrator and he is having a conversation with you in a Pakistani cafe. He tells you all about the years he spent in America, as a student and then at one of the most prestigeous companies in NYC. And now here he sits, in a cafe in Lahore with a beard telling you, a complete stranger, about this whole other life while you wait to find out what happened to make him come home.
I have to admit though, that I am still confused by the ending. I put the book down and said "eh?". If anyone could enlighten me I would be grateful. Am I just being thick here?
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Interesting if slightly thin novella
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The narrator is a Pakistani meeting an American in a Pakistani restaurant. Through a dialogue in which we only hear the narrator's voice, we learn of his Ivy League education in America, his love for a fellow student, his employment with a leading management consultancy, and his increasing disillusionment with the US, catalysed by 9/11. As the novel comes to its ambiguous conclusion we increasingly understand the relationship between the narrator and his guest.
This is an intriguing novella, which portrays the feeling of place beautifully and is very skillful in building up tension through its extremely sparse prose. On the downside, I was left wanting more. Too much contemporary literature is turgid and obese, but this book is the opposite, I was left wanting more detail, more depth.
Recommended, but more next time please.
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Superficial and annoying, but the writer shows some promise
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This was the choice for our reading group and I have to say that it is a huge missed opportunity. At a time when it would be interesting as well as useful to have an insight into the mind of the muslim minority, there is a definite need for an accomplished novel to portray the relationship and tensions between eastern and western mindsets. Unfortunately this book is not it.
It feels like no more than an attempt to make a fast buck out of a perceived gap in the market. It is short, written in an irritating narrative voice with a wholly unbelievable framing context that intrudes clumsily into a fairly plain and inconsequential tale of ragheads to riches.
I am not sure what point Hamid was trying to make in his too slight work. I am not even convinced he knew what the point of it was. the conversion from yuppy to fundamentalist is woefully underaccounted for and therefore hard to believe. And the sense of alienation experienced by the narrator is flimsy and seems to have more to do with class than ethnicity. At times Hamid openly cribs from the Great Gatsby, but such moments only go to show how much less of a writer he is than Fitzgerald.
Too much is passed over too quickly. Characters are little more than cyphers and Americans are largely dismissed as belonging to a single myopic social formation, with no sense of any debate within American culture. On the rare occasions when Hamid begins to develop a theme, he seems to give up the effort too easily and move on to safer, less demanding ground. It is no wonder that this lightweight book managed to find its way onto prize lists. It is so undemanding, yet waves a promise of something interesting in its cynical title. How could the cliterati resist?
For all that, one must congratulate Hamid on the ending, where the reader is left with a well contrived sense of the mutual mistrust of east and west.
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is he or isn't he?
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A slight book and as a result easy to get through in one go and the style makes it a quick read too. if you ever wondered how it must have felt to be a Muslim in America after 9:11 then this begins to paint a picture of what must happen when mass hysteria sets in. It is not a sensationalist book by any means but it draws you step by step into a plausible account of one man's fall from grace in the Promised Land that is America as the scales drop from his eyes and he sees how others see his home country (Pakistan) and how far he has travelled from his roots. The ending keeps you guessing up to and beyond the last sentence.
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