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| The Reluctant Fundamentalist | 
 enlarge | Author: Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £14.99
Buy Used: £3.49
You Save: £11.50 (77%)
New (13) Collectible (1) from £4.36
Avg. Customer Rating:  60 reviews
Sales Rank: 47979
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0241143659
EAN: 9780241143650
ASIN: 0241143659
Publication Date: March 1, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Complete with an excellent dust jacket.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 56-60 of 60 | | « PREV 1 ... | | |
 Elegant, taut and sharp May 10, 2007
15 out of 20 found this review helpful
This is a special little book.
Its unusual technique might jar at first - at times it feels unatural - but it has the effect of engaging you in the singular stream of its narrative- the chapters are merely breathers and an excuse for you to get a glass of water.
By giving away the game in the title, Hamid allows you to really enjoy the few characters in the book and use your own imagination to fill in the detail without feeling cheated. The overall effect is a book that feels even less that 170 pages and yet is as satisfying and complete as good literature should be.
 Elegant and thoughtful April 24, 2007
18 out of 23 found this review helpful
This slim, beautifully written book is written as a monologue spoken by a young man, born and living in Pakistan, but educated in America. He is telling his life story to an American stranger in Lahore.
This outwardly simple book is packed full of ideas. There are themes of loss and grief, but also of nostalgia, of the dangerous slide of both countries and individuals who lose wealth and influence but retain the pride of earlier days, best illustrated in the lines "As I have already told you I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boys sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for hat we had had and lost. Some of my relatives held onto imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction: unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide."
There is a sophisticated analysis of the imperial nature of America, with discussion of how the brightest and best of the developing world are trained as "janissaries", isolated from their cultural roots without fully being assimilated into their masters these child soldiers have nothing to do but work or fight for their adopted nation.
This novel is not political dialectic, it is intensely personal, and that is why it works so well. It encompasses a repeatedly thwarted love affair, which is drawn wonderfully well and a brilliant sense of place.
The reader knows, throughout the book that they are not getting everything from the aptly named Changez; he is an unreliable narrator because of what is omitted, but what he tells you feels true, intense and is not the usual, superficial analyses.
A book with real depth.
Superb book on 'loss' April 19, 2007
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
I had recently finished reading a Guardian review/eulogy of Hemingway's 'Old Man in the Sea' when I read this book. "Jackpot" I thought ... superbly conceived, tightly constructed, with many meanings on different levels. On the surface level, the book is about Changez (meaning change) - a Pakistani student, and his relationship with an American woman whose great love died of cancer (loss 1). It is also about a man and his consumer job which he eventually loathed and left (loss 2), and then left his home in America and returned to Pakistan (loss 3). The book is set before, during and after 9/11. Thus the lingering "melancholic" theme which saturates this book can also be seen by the many of us who are now grieving for a world, an America, we feel we have lost. (This thesis will obviously annoy some!) There are gentle and exquisite perceptions of the American character, which are bound to upset some people whilst making others smile without rancour. An exquisite book, a 'must read.' Keep writing Mr. Hamid, please. PS: Very apt and perfect description of Neruda's house in Chile.
Taut, sensitive and original April 7, 2007
10 out of 27 found this review helpful
A taut, sensitive, original and winningly concise treatment of identity, belonging, grief, acceptance and integration, which does not waste a single word.
A successful Pakistani living happily in the US finds himself questioning his values in the wake of 9/11, as he rather reluctantly acknowledges that he does not share the depth of his hosts' grief. As an atmosphere of mutual suspicion leads him to question his values and to work out whether to follow his heart or his head, this book offers the sensitive approach to 9/11 which literature has been crying out for.
 Reluctant Fundamentalist should be read reluctantly March 15, 2007
6 out of 33 found this review helpful
Mohsin Hamid has produced a dull novel that is bereft of any creativity or literary value. I would like to be fair to him and his labour but there is not much to celebrate in his latest novel Reluctant Fundamentalist. Reading, like any other important activity, is sacred and I take it very seriously. Firstly, I think the title of Mr. Hamid's novel tells you all without even reading 170 pages of it. So the publishers have done an abominable job with respect to naming the novel because it leaves little or even nothing for imagination. Readers who like good literature will see through this cheap technique. Even before flipping a page of this novel one is thinking about the eventual fate of the reluctant fundamentalist. Is the literature reading public so inept that we have to be foretold about the central idea of the novel by its name? I think that is not the case because the novel is very bad as a whole. So it does not make much difference but the name of the novel is purely to sell the book in the post Osama Bin Ladin world. So the person who named this novel ought to be ashamed of him or herself. Perhaps it was done deliberately, for the publishers wanted to find a convenient or even a cheap way to sell a book, which in an ideal world should not have been published.
It is repeated everywhere on the Internet and elsewhere that Mr. Hamid is from Lahore, Pakistan. He was educated at the Aitcheson College, Lahore, Princeton University and Harvard Law School. After finishing his education he became a management consultant at the premier management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Why is all this important for us to know? It should not be of any consequence to us. I am sure if we, the public at large, all worked in employment agencies then it would, for Mr. Hamid has an excellent resume, but all this background information is very relevant to his novel as well. In fact, the idea for this novel must have come to Mr. Hamid by looking at himself in the mirror and then reading some stories on western educated students turning terrorists must have inspired him to create a novel out of it. So he created a person with his background and turned him into a person who becomes a reluctant fundamentalist. That is all there is in this novel. But let me still try to give you some more perspective on this grotesque novel.
Reluctant Fundamentalist is like a bad formulaic American action film. My guess is that Mr. Hamid must have watched his share of ghastly American action films and as a result, he must have retained some imprint of it in his mind. Not surprisingly, Reluctant Fundamentalist is about a young man who leaves Lahore because he received a full scholarship to attend the Princeton University. Can you guess what happens next? He graduates top of his class at Princeton and gets hired by the top US Valuation firm, which, it has to be told, only hires the best of the best students from the top US universities. Everyone at Princeton wants this job but Mr. Hamid's reluctant fundamentalist gets it. And with this job he had made an entry into a world which he would have no access to had he not been equipped with a business card of his valuation firm. Whilst I was reading this book, I kept on asking myself, when is this person going to become a reluctant fundamentalist and what will drive him to become one. Mind you: that part never comes.
This novel is not held by imaginative or creative force but the only reason that compels you to read it is to find out what is going to happen to this academic genius from Princeton. It reads like a tabloid story. Suddenly, on his trip to Chile, he wakes up to find out that he was from a poor country and was the `other' in the world where empires ruled everyone else. Mr. Hamid fails to bring forth this transformation in this person. True, this has happened before but Mr. Hamid fails to capture this transformation. Then this story falls flat on its nose and passes out.
After coming back from Chile, the proto-reluctant-fundamentalist decides to wear a beard and this alarms everyone in his New York City office. The post 9/11 environment and threat to Pakistan drives him to hate the life he has embraced in the post 9/11 United States and he decides to fly back to Lahore for good. I must add that there is also a love story in the middle of this as well. So now that all the ingredients of this novel are in place, now let me make some judgements.
This is a horrible little novel which leaves one to imagine why would Mr. Hamid write this and why would someone publish this drivel. Reading this novel did not affect me at all and there was nothing special about the narrative. I found it annoying and boring to read the mirrored narrative created by the author. But what bewilders me is that so many big names (for e.g. Philip Pullman, Kiran Desai and Hisham Matar) have given this novel great reviews. I could not believe that anyone could write a good review after reading this novel. Did they really read this novel? If yes, then I wonder, why did they give it such good reviews? I am not even a writer, let alone a novelist, and it is graphically obvious to me after reading this novel that Mr. Hamid has produced a literary titanic. However, it surprises me that after reading this novel some people have compared him to great Camus. If this was the case then I would have attempted to write the definitive obituary of novel. Finally: if you want to read this piffle of a novel then go ahead and waste your money but try to read it reluctantly because it will be a dreary and mortifyingly uninteresting journey.
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