|
| The Reluctant Fundamentalist | 
 enlarge | Author: Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £1.83
You Save: £6.16 (77%)
New (26) from £3.06
Avg. Customer Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 495
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0141029544
EAN: 9780141029542
ASIN: 0141029544
Publication Date: April 24, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Literary laziness October 19, 2007
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
The themes in this book resonated deeply with me, having grown up in America in an Indian family. I can understand the duplicity of Changez's relationship with American culture. But I agree that this book has a lazy, implausible conclusion. Changez struggles eloquently with what America is good for: success, teamwork, innovation, freedom... and what America is bad for: ruthless materialism, ignorance, an inability to be self-critical. But author Mohsin Hamid then suddenly assassinates his own main character. Is he really suggesting that Changez would go back to Pakistan and not ask why his own homeland is such a broken society? Does he really expect us to believe that his sensitive, thoughtful and hard-working protagonist would come up with just one crude answer: Death to America? How ludicrous. Just perpetuates the notion that all Muslim men somehow have terrorists lurking inside them. Utterly disappointing and perfectly illustrates how undiscerning western literary editors are about the East. It's usually either an exotic and mystical place full of love and spices..... or savage.
 A brilliant, powerful monologue October 10, 2007
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a beautifully written novel - rather short and a quick read - I read it over one evening. The style jarred for the first four of five pages, but then I quickly settled into what is a fascinating and gripping monologue. The narrator Changez is speaking to an American stranger whilst they sit together at a cafe table in Lahore. The American is of course, all Americans - or possibly all westerners. I have been trying to decide whether this is, in any way a controversial novel, I didn't find it so, but then maybe some readers will. Changez's first reaction to the Sept 11 attacks is prehaps surprising, maybe even shocking. This is a perceptive, and powerful exammination of how the lives of Muslims changed after 9/11.
Less Is More September 30, 2007
10 out of 14 found this review helpful
I reluctantly bought this book (it has just been published, and the bookshop I was browsing had it on offer); and I reluctantly started to read it (giving it a try principally because it was short). Neither the title nor the book's cover do is any favours.
However, I have just finished re-reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist, having been blown away by it first time around and having passed copies on to friends to similarly (reluctantly) fantastic reviews.
This is a taut, terrific book, beautifully written, perfectly paced and urgently relevant. It recalls, among other short novels, the impossibly unattainable 'glamour' of Gatsby, the alienation of L'Etranger and the ghostliness of The Dead, whilst remaining resolutely 'modern' (as in 21st century) and unabashed by such illustrious forebears.
Hell, I even quickly got over Hamid naming his protagonist, "Changez" ("changes", geddit, in a novel about mutability). Technically, I am still puzzling quite how Hamid pulls off the combination of tense foreboding with the sense of luring the reader (and the American to whom the monologue is addressed) further into his tale. For Changez is a classically unreliable narrator, albeit a beguiling one.
If any of this makes the book sound earnest or hard going -- it's not! Though very different in every respect other than their readability, this is the most exciting new novel I have read, in the page-turner sense, since Sarah Waters' Fingersmith.
 Good September 23, 2007
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
Whilst admittedly the style of the book is a little annoying at first the book does rapidly becomes a page turner. The story is perhaps one that's familiar to any diaspora, though one may have achieved material success or finished top of ones class and hence integrated on one level, there is still an incredible sense of being on the outside and looking in. Changez, our protagonist, works hard to beat his American contemporaries at their own game only to realise he no longer wants to play their game anymore. The story charts his journey from being a student at Princeton and gaining entry to a top firm to him sitting in a Cafe in Pakistan. Along the way we meet the book's major flaw, his American girlfriend who's almost surreal enough to fit in Alice in Wonderland. Aside from her the book reads well and there are some poignant insights that pop up from time to time in this short book.
Memorable and original September 16, 2007
9 out of 17 found this review helpful
I was motivated to write this review by seeing the review from Micropakistan "Khuldun", which was unfair on the novel and I suppose, revealed more about the inadequacies of that reviewer than it did about the novel in question.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist did leave me wanting more, in the sense that it is opaque, ambiguous and oblique, but that is what also makes it such an interesting book - and it is an interesting and unusual book. It certainly stood out from the crowd in the Booker Longlist, and it deserves to. Hamid writes beautifully - he captures the cadences of speech of his protagonist in to me (acquainted with a few highly educated and intelligent Pakistanis) an authentic voice, and he also explores in a sophisticated and provocative way the culture clash experienced not just by Pakistanis but by so many individuals who have left their homes in search of education, financial gain and validation. I would love to see the novel performed: the way the dramatic monologue is written cries out for a good actor to present it on stage. It is a book that repays re-reading, allows for a range of interpretations and encourages the reader not to approach issues of race and religion in a simplistic fashion. I would highly recommend it. Additionally, its brevity is refreshing.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
