The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
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Book Reviews of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Book Review: GROLIES
Summary: 2 Stars
I am hastening firstly to explain that I normally avoid fiction that has won a prize or been shortlisted for a prize, particularly British prizes, and most definitely that I avoid paying for them. However, one is occasionally obliged to read them, so I do so diligently and quickly to get the duty out of the way. Rather like eating your boiled cabbage first. Secondly, to whom is story likely to appeal - who will like this novella? To answer this, see the title of my review, which comes from a tabloid article on the acronymous notations which doctors (particularly GPs) allegedly make on our case notes - eg, `GOK'= God Only Knows, and `UBI'=Unexplained Beer Injury. I read these articles avidly, as they say so much in so short a space, and I am sometimes convinced of their accuracy. So it is that the last article I read has `GROLIES'=Guardian Reader Of Limited Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt, and it to this class of person that I commend this story. (Guardian - socialista UK newspaper.)
BACKGROUND, BUT NOT PLOT SPOILER
Bright young man from Pakistan goes to Princeton, gets prestige job in New York as business analyst valuing companies (eg, for flotation on stock market, or selling on). Meets American girl. 9/11 happens. Things go pear-shaped. Bright less-young man is back in Pakistan and meets an American tourist and sort-of has an astoundingly long conversation with him as the tourist drinks tea. The tone is calm, the story very eventful but even-paced and retrospective whilst still maintaining a rooted in the now feel.
ANALYSIS
The prose is literate but not written as by one who rejoices in the full-blooded Anglo-Saxon-Latinate-Greco-British Empireness of the English language. The grammatical structures of another language lurk beneath the English cadence, and there is a sense of having been fluently translated-as-written from a foreign thought pattern into good English, which subtly avoids being instinctual English. The interior monologue style is tiresomely stifling and palls on the page, the first page in fact, as a stranger who approached an American tourist in that manner anywhere, let alone in Pakistan, would be dismissed as a lunatic or creep of some sort. It reminds me of a mangled, uneven, ill-at-ease `Catcher In The Rye' first person POV technique. The story is clearly to some extent autobiographical, as the back cover blurb itself makes clear as it echoes the central character's experiences in the author's life. This adds to the rich detail and vividness, and naturally works well with the first person-ess of it all. The descriptions of food and buildings in both places are good as far as they go, but are not enough to bridge the gap or glue it all together. Rather like a cheese grater on mild Cheddar.
Our sensitive protagonist is alienated from the US culture, but not as in Catcher in the Rye because he is disorientated by coming to terms with the world of crass and superficial adult hypocrisies which he will all too soon leave school to embark upon himself, unless he is strong enough and quick enough to define his own principles and start to live by them as he means to go on. No, our protagonist is of an alien culture and alone in his personal bubble. He outwardly and materially succeeding in his work but is inwardly isolated and not adopting the country which has adopted him. He is an actor and a spectator at the same time but never really at ease in his own skin. He does not suspect that America is built on deeper and greater foundations than simple meritocracy, essential though that is. (Forget not that the ever-recurrent pernicious tendency to promote on other than merit was long ago skewered by Socrates, who asked his listeners did they prefer to be treated when ill by the most skilled doctor available, or take the advice of their friends who were skilled in shoe-making or horse-riding?)
Although the story is nominally rooted in our 21st century clash of cultures and the war on terror there is no sense of the real motivations that underlie jihadism and deep roots of the conflict. The reference to the janissaries is grossly misused, as they were abducted and enslaved, but he is a volunteer. This distinction makes the two not just worlds apart, but makes all the difference in any world. The emotional pivot of the story is the flash of truth in the protagonist's inner reaction to the 9/11 attack. The moral compass and generic intellectual background of the protagonist are socialist-sympathy-for-poor concerns. But you have to make wealth before you can distribute it. The protagonist is unable to truly engage with the spontaneous order and success of the free market, even though (in the story) having at one level fully comprehendingly encountered it and successfully taken part in it as a high-powered business analyst. Many a businessman understands business but economics not all. But this poor character does not really even understand business. Buying and selling requires two parties, and they both must benefit, or they do not do business. Simple as that. And the business does not guarantee anything beyond that, even though all prosperity and wealth flow from it and it alone. What you do with it is up to you. Irony within irony, but socialist is as socialist does. This is the heart of the story, but it is an empty heart. It reminds of why I avoid shortlisted books, I am fearful of why they were really shortlisted.
Book Review: How to understand Islamic Fundamentalism
Summary: 5 Stars
Of course, I hate that word. It implies something false about Islam, relegating it to the Western understanding of religion, and forcing another culture to conform to the standards of our own. This is why most Islamicists (those who study Islam) prefer the term Islamist rather than Fundamentalist, for Islam is inherently a religion that turns to the fundamentals. At best, Islamic Fundamentalist is redundant. But sadly, the term Islamist has not yet caught on with the general public, and so we are reduced to using poor terms in order to make ourselves understood.
I've never come across a format quite like this before. It bore certain similarities to the Dear Reader style of the past, recently so well articulated in The City of Dreaming Books. But Hamid had a very unusual twist. Everything is from the first person perspective of the protagonist in the short conversation which frames the book. You really hear no other voice but that of Changez; we only know his thoughts, and only those thoughts that he chooses to express. This is a conversation with only one person.
Far from being a gimmick, this approach is central to the novel, and to the amazing ending. We follow the changes in the life of Changez, and more importantly his philosophy of life, and we are gripped from beginning to end. There wasn't a moment when I got bored. There wasn't a line in the novel that I felt misplaced, or where too much was added. The novel weaves between the centerpiece conversation at the cafe and the story of Changez' life, and somehow, Hamid weaves both together as one tapestry.
Changez is sitting in a cafe with a nervous American in Pakistan. Hamid's intricate description of the cafe and surrounding square brought back personal memories of Djamma f'naa in Marrakesh, Morocco, and Hamid describes so vividly I felt like I was back in the square, with it's sellers and food vendors. Hamid accurately captures the Middle Eastern ability to observe others intimately, as well as common American misconceptions and misreadings of life around them. (Such as the common perception that Middle Eastern cities are more dangerous than American cities, when the inverse is true, about a hundred times over.) This was a completely believable American, and a completely believable Pakistani.
Changez' backstory is also gripping. I wanted to know what happened next to the characters. I still find it hard to believe that this is a work of fiction- the characters are drawn that real. There was only one moment that was not as believable- that of the sexual relations between Changez and Erica. Until I realized that they accurately modeled the relationship between America and the West that Hamid was trying to illustrate. America can't have a satisfying relationship with another country. It can only do so if that other country pretends to be something it's not- pretends to be culturally something much closer to the American view of the world. If that other country denies its own culture, than America can deal with it, and happily so.
And this relationship between countries and cultures is of course the underlying theme of Hamid's work. You may not agree with Hamid, or Changez. (For the book has the feel that it is somewhat autobiographical.) You may be intensely patriotic, and ra-ra for America. But this book more than any other I've read helps to explain how someone can become an Islamist, and what leads them to see the U.S. as an enemy of all the values that their own culture holds dear. You may not agree at the end that America is an empire. But you will at least understand how others perceive us in this way. For as I have known too many Americans who act like the American in the cafe in Pakistan, I also have known too many Muslims (and indeed, many foreign non-Muslims) who have come to the same conclusions as Changez does.
How I wish I could discuss the ending with you. For that ending goes rather to the heart of the issues of what it means to be an Islamist, and what it means to be empire. I will leave you with that thought to contemplate as you close the last page of the book, and consider a brave new world.
Also recommended: Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity by Ron Sider, for its description of how America lives off the back of the 2/3rds World.
Book Review: Return of the Janissary
Summary: 5 Stars
The book depends for its success on the amazing ambiguity of fundamentals and the pervasiveness of ambivalence.
Some books can't really be reviewed without disclosing the ending, because they are largely defined by the ending. This is especially so for short novels like this one.
Fat novels don't depend on the solution of their plot - the journey is the goal. Short novels or long stories include the ending in their meaning.
The book is a monologue, set in Lahore's old city. A Pakistani returnee from Princeton and New York City talks to a foreigner, probably an American, but we don't know for sure. Whatever the other man does is disclosed to us only by the comments of the speaker. And how he loves talking! (I have lived in the country and have met many who had this same passion. It is generally quite likable.) The other is uneasy. He seems to know as little about the speaker as we.
The speaker tells us about his expatriate life and his return home. He had been a high flyer in Princeton, then ditto at a firm in NY. He worked as a financial analyst. He learned to focus on the fundamentals. He had met an American beauty on a classmates' vacation in Greece and she introduced him to NY upper strata. His exotic cultivated superiority was attractive. He is from an upper class run down family background, like impoverished aristocracy.
The turning point for me, when I stopped admiring the writing, was the first chapter and the follow up about the affair with the NY woman. It struck me as impossibly banal and meaningless. It should make me take a star away. Interest is kept up by the work experience and the political situation.
September 11 comes and soon all the high time will be over.
He experiences it, or rather observes it in a Manila hotel room (Makati Shangri-la, just for the sake of illegitimate product placement; a nice place! It so happens that I was in Pudong Shangri-la at the time) and he experiences satisfaction that America is brought to her knees. He is shocked at his own reaction.
Prior to this, he had already noticed sometimes that he put himself more in the place of the locals looking at his own team of company analysts, rather than as a genuine part of the American team. He sees Americans now as the `officer class' of globalization, and he partly wants to be in, while other parts of him want to be out of it.
To his American colleagues on the job in Manila, he feigns shock at the attack. Upon arrival in NY, he gets treated with suspicion, but otherwise things seem to develop as before. Infatuation with his girl friend is strong as before, but she can't fully open up to him and the relationship fails.
He makes a visit home, shortly after the Afghanistan invasion and during a phase of high tension between Pakistan and India. He drifts away from his `American perspective'. When he returns to his job, his attitude is gone. He grows a beard, as outward documentation of change. He is sent on a project assignment to Chile and he drops out. He can't do this any more. He is reluctant to focus on the fundamentals.
He had experienced little open xenophobia, until after 9-11, and until he grew a beard. He had never been a strict observer of his religion's rules. He will still not be a religious fundamentalist.
His boss patronized him. The boss is a man from a simple background who fought his way to the top, and he imagined our hero to be similar. That is so wrong. The narrator is not at all in the same position. He sees himself as a part of a superior history and culture, and he resents being treated like a case for compassion. At the same time he feels friendship towards his boss, and he feels like a traitor when he quits.
If this were just a senior writing project from HS, as some of the negative opinions say, it would not be so full of content worth summarizing. Some opinions have a difficulty distinguishing narrator and author, fiction and biography. Some accuse the writer of `ingratitude'. That is all very naïve. It would be far more useful to listen and digest.
If you take the position, at this point, that it must be one or the other, that black is black and white is white, you have voluntarily made yourself less intelligent for no good reason.
Sometimes a flawed book deserves more attention than a perfectly streamlined one.
Book Review: A Great Book from a Promising Young Writer
Summary: 5 Stars
Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a really good book. I can't imagine I have gone so long without discovering this great writer. When the book came out in 2007, it apparently awakened a lot of strong emotions in the readers. In many cases, this strong emotional response obscured the beauty and the importance of this book.
The plot of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is quite simple. Changez, a young Pakistani who was educated at Princeton and worked on Wall Street, is telling his story to a nameless American he meets in a restaurant in Lahore. Changez is both fascinated and repelled by America that offered him an education and a lucrative job but at the same time, made his life intolerable in a multitude of ways. Changez's uneasy relationship with America is mirrored by his equally painful involvement with a woman called Erica. (As you can see, Hamid is quite heavy-handed with the way he names his characters. He makes his Erica-America parallel so obvious that it becomes annoying.)
When Changez first arrives in the US, he discovers that the opulence that surrounds him in his Ivy League school and his Wall Street job makes it difficult to maintain the same vision of national identity that he brought with him from home. He likes reminding himself that his people had created a complex and sophisticated civilization long before anubody heard of the United States.
As much as Changez prides himself on his people's glorious past and enjoys contrasting it with the recent historical origins of America, he has to rely on his American success to gain access to a social class his family was expelled from in Pakistan. For a while, Changez manages to swallow all the instances of discrimination he experiences. He also studiously avoids noticing the suffering of people who lose their jobs as a result of his professional activities. The reward for being an obedient little cog in the Wall Street machine is too high.
But then 9/11 comes and Changez cannot maintain his state of obliviousness any longer. His initial reaction to the events of 9/11 is complex, ranging from contentment to shame, and he explores it honestly. In the US, everything that has to do with 9/11 has been transformed into a holy cow of sorts. Any attempt to analyze what happened and how one reacted is branded as anti-American. Hamid's book received a lot of criticism for daring to discuss 9/11 in a way that is a little more profound than the official narrative. Unfortunately, those who insist that the only valid narrative of 9/11 is the simplistic one sold to us by George W. Bush don't realize that they are not doing us all any service by denying this hugely traumatic event the right to be explored in all its facets.
Hamid is just beginning as a writer and this is only his second novel. There is certain heavy-handedness that sometimes comes through in his writing. From time to time, he fails to recognize the moment when the writer should stop explaining himself and let the readers draw their own conclusions. He is also still searching for his own voice, and that's why there is quite a lot of V.S. Naipaul in the way he constructs his sentences and builds his plot. Still, these little flaws can be forgiven to an author who can create a book as beautiful as The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
In the recent decades, the writers from India and Pakistan have produced the best literature in the English language of anybody on the planet. Moshin Hamid is a wonderful addition to the pantheon of great writers from the region who keep literature in English alive.
I also wanted to add a couple of words about the Kindle edition of this book. Unfortunately, the Kindle version contains quite a few typos. You get a typo every other page and sometimes, there are 3-4 typos on a single page. The book is readable but it's very annoying to have a crucial word messed up. When you have to stop every once in a while and guess what a word means, that really breaks the flow of the reading process. I understand that the goal is to have every single book available on Kindle, but quality should not be sacrificed to this extent.
Book Review: East and West - never the twain shall meet
Summary: 5 Stars
Mohsin Hamid's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" seeks to elucidate the complex emotions successful immigrants into Western society feel about their own ethnicity, culture. identity and place in a superficially welcoming foreign culture. The unnamed tourist Changez addresses himself to in his narrative is merely a literary devise standing for the reader - quite clearly a foreigner - not necessarily but most likely American or European.
The format of this slim yet profound little novella is quite simple. Hamid enters the psyche of Changez, his protagonist who now returned to his own country reflects on the years he had spent in America, the proverbial land of opportunity open to whomsoever had the talent and the determination to make it. And make it he did - until things started to go wrong and then fall apart for him in his private and professional life following the 9/11 incident.
But why doesn't Changez feel unalloyed gratitude to America ? After all, America gave him the chance to elevate himself above the grinding poverty of his motherland and make a better life for himself in a new place. Worse and more puzzling is, why he feels secretly pleased - even if it's for the smallest fraction of a moment - when he learns about the 9/11 attack ? The answers are there on the pages, written between the lines. Admiration for the host country's progressive values, mixed with a secret burning shame from having to subordinate one's own ethnicity simply to be accepted and then finding out that despite making these quiet concessions, one isn't and can never be accepted due to racial and religious differences. The result is a rage difficult to fathom and even more impossible to explain. The sheen of civility that exists between host and guest is shown to be fragile in the best of times. It shatters and then evaporates in an instant under stress.
Hamid has written a wonderful little book. His language is direct and sincere. He makes no apologies for either Changez or his host country. The bitterness and cryptic tone in Changez's voice conveys a disappointment that merely states a fact but doesn't attribute blame. Whether intentionally or not, Hamid made it hard for me to empathize with Changez's girlfriend Erica, her endless pining for her dead fiancé Chris and subsequent mental decline. She knew how Changez felt about her and yet used him - in my view - for a shoulder to cry on. Get over Chris or leave Changez alone. I wanted badly for him to throw her over. Pity he didn't and sadly paid for it. Even Erica's mother's liberalism didn't help me like the family better. Maybe Hamid intended to contrast the sensitive self absorbed individual Western psyche with more pragmatic Eastern concerns. Maybe not.
"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is a timely reminder that globalisation may make the world flatter but doesn't make all cultures the same. The challenges are great and unless unceasing efforts are made to bridge people across cultures, peace will always be a mirage disrupted by race, language and religion. A wonderful little book. Buy it - you won't be disappointed.