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| The Reluctant Fundamentalist | 
 enlarge | Author: Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £2.87
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New (24) from £2.87
Avg. Customer Rating:  57 reviews
Sales Rank: 236
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
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 2 - 3 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, UK *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Finely worked prose covering deeply felt issues but too unresolved to reach the highest marks October 31, 2007
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
There is nothing bloated or overdone about Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Yet this sparse, finely cropped short novel tackles some of the challenging issues. Changez, a Pakistani Muslim from a once wealthy family in Lahore, experiences his own version of the American Dream when his talent and his Princeton scholarship lead him to a high-flying job in the world of New York finance and to relationship with a beautiful, enigmatic all-American girl who represents his passport into high society as well. But, over aromatic food and exotic drinks back in Lahore, Changez relates in a one-sided conservation with an American traveller how he never felt entirely at ease and how the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the subsequent repercussions - both political and personal ones - roused him from his American Dream: his reluctance to follow the advice of his mentor in business to focus on the fundamentals is replaced by an hankering to concentrate on fundamentals of a very different sort.
Yet at times the very sparsity which makes the novel so compelling leaves the reader in a void of ignorance. One is, for instance, driven to seek to understand Changez's conversion but the text provides so little challenge to Changez's narrative that it is left flimsy, incomplete and thus unresolved. This is perhaps Hamid's intention - to set out clearly that there are no easy answers; that Westerners will always fail to understand the East. In that sense this is a deeply unsettling novel and leaves one wishing for just a little more, a little more insight, a little more depth. The sense of `unfinishnessed' is only heightened by the ambiguous, unresolved but perfectly composed ending. Its short listing for the Booker Prize can be justified on the grounds of its fine prose, well-worked form and challenging topics alone but one can equally understand why it didn't win. It is perhaps in the end just a tad too ambiguous, too ethereal, to deliver the sort of challenge which would make it stand head and shoulders above the rest. All round an excellent read which will linger.
Fresh & Remarkable October 29, 2007
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
So many novels these days are bloated to within an inch of their verbose lives, dying for some crisply ruthless editing, so it's really exciting to see such a taut novella being published this year. For such a wee novel to express so many complex ideas is nothing short of remarkable. Many contemporary writers attempt to deliver a response, however inedequate, to 9/11; here is one that offers something original and bold.
 Literary laziness October 19, 2007
10 out of 13 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.
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