the reluctant fundamentalist

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007, Mohsin Hamid’s second book The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a tale told by a young Pakistani to an unnamed, unspeaking, unknown American; about his journey from the American dream to political fundamentalism in Pakistan.

Changez is a Princeton graduate who wins a job at a prestigious management consultancy.  For a time, he lives the high life in New York, with an expenses account and a tentative romance with an upper-class American girl, Erica. Then someone flies a plane into a building.  Changez becomes an outsider in his adopted city. Erica is drawing away from him into deep depression.  America attacks Afghanistan. Changez becomes obsessed with following the news from home, and can’t find meaning in his job any more. Erica disappears.  Changez resigns, and leaves New York for his home in Lahore.

As this story unwinds, the tension slowly and imperceptibly increases as darkness falls around the cafe in which Changez and his American listener are sitting. Hamid is leading the reader somewhere, just as he leads his American listener back to his hotel, along a dark street where menacing shadows are drawing closer to the pair.  The story ends with a threat of violence which suddenly reveals what Changez has become and exactly why the American has been so interested in his story.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is one of the best books I’ve read this year. The story seems simple but  Mohsin Hamid builds it towards a stunning and terrifying climax that left me holding my breath for the last few pages.  It is also a clear and nuanced analysis of the tensions between Islamic countries and the West as they are experienced by ordinary people. It’s a short book at only 184 pages – Mohsin Hamid has said ‘I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through’, and I would defintely read it again.  Highly recommended.

Further reading: ‘Why do they hate us‘ – Mohsin Hamid, Washington Post

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
Hamish Hamilton, 2007

all the president’s men

Written by the two journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men is part detective story, part political thriller and part first-draft of history.  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ended up on the Watergate story by accident, stayed on it despite personal difference, and ultimately uncovered one of the greatest political scandals the US has ever known, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The book was written and published before the full story of Watergate was known, and so it’s sometimes a bit confusing.  It’s slow to start with, the significance of events and people are not clear, and the two journalists seem to uncover a lot of information that doesn’t make sense. There are a lot of names to remember, and many of these characters don’t appear again.  However, these are all natural consequences of the book being an account of real events, rather than fiction.  Once it becomes clear to the journalists who the major players are, the story begins to make more sense and the pace picks up.

The journalists are like detectives in the way they collect and assemble information, but unlike detectives, they can’t compel anyone to talk to them, which makes their job harder and the story more frustrating.  Everything they publish has to be verified by at least three sources, and many times it’s ‘obvious’ what is going on but the story can’t advance until things are verified.  The journalist’s frustration at times like these is evident.

Because the book ends before the full extent of the Watergate scandal is known, the end is a bit ambiguous and unsatisfying, I suppose because we now know what happened, and because the thread of events now looks clearer than it would have at the time.

What I found most interesting about this book was the background it gives about American politics and political institutions.  To someone from a country that is at best ambiguous and at worst deeply cynical and government and institutions, the reverence that Americans (even investigative journalists) have for the office of President seems strange. For a reader used to the Westminster system, the executive system of government looks opaque and ripe for cronyism.

The other interesting aspect of the book is the window it gives onto the world of investigative journalism and news in the days before computers, mobile phones, and internet.  The journalists meet with sources in person, they use ingenious things like reverse telephone directories to track down people, and records (both the journalists’ and those of their investigative subjects) are all single-copy paper documents that can disappear quite easily.  On the other hand, their sources in government are happy to talk on the phone from their offices – obviously the days of manual switchboards, untraceable calls, and office doors rather than open plan layouts made it safer.

All the President’s Men is a good read, and highly recommended.  I’m keen to see the movie and perhaps read Woodward and Bernstein’s other Watergate book, The Final Days.

All the President’s Men
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Bloomsbury, 1974

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a river sutra

A River Sutra, by Gita Mehta is a set of stories within stories set around the Narmada river in western India.  The river, which is one of the five sacred rivers of India, draws a varied group of characters to its banks, all seeking solace and healing from troubled lives.

The stories are held together by an unnamed narrator who has retired to a remote government rest house on the banks of the Narmada as a sort of vanaprastha or detachment from the world. He’s not very good at maintaining this detachment: curiosity about those who visit the rest house or cross his path in his forest wanderings is constantly drawing him back to human contact.

Two stories are told to him by the local mullah, and the other three are told by people he meets.  A wealthy Jain renounces his wealth and becomes a sadhu only to find that he cannot give up the capacity to love.  A music teacher in an unhappy marriage finds solace in teaching a blind boy to sing, only to see him killed by a jealous rival.  A young executive from Calcutta is bewitched and sent mad by a spirit woman in the forests of Darjeeling.  An old courtesan searches for her daughter, kidnapped by bandits. And a Hindu aescetic rescues a child from a brothel and teaches her to be a musician.

Ultimately all the stories are about love in all its forms: lust, madness, redemption, sacrifice, care and sorrow. The narrator, a childless widower of an arranged marriage with no children, has little experience of love, and is learning throughout the book what he has missed.

Too much mysticism and sacred wisdom in Indian books can be irritating, but the ‘tale-within-a-tale’ structure of this book tempers this by adding uncertainty and magic to the stories, as one would expect from tall tales told to us by another.  It is a very slow-moving book, but it has its own rhythm, tied to the slow-moving waters of the great Narmada river (one of those wide and powerful rivers that appear placid and unmoving on the surface). The language is lush and sometimes a little too descriptive, and the book is sometimes a little too obvious in linking the stories back to the river and its religious significance. But overall, not a bad book, and I’d recommend it as a good holiday read for a summer afternoon.

A River Sutra
Gita Mehta
Vintage, 1993

house of meetings

House of meetings, by Martin Amis, is a story about fraternal and triangular love. It is written as the recollections of the narrator, who has travelled back to Russia to revisit the gulag in which he was imprisoned in the 1950s.

With him in the gulag was his brother, Lev, married to the girl they both loved, Zola.  The book uses love triangle between Lev, Zola, and the narrator to explore the love between the brothers and their attempts to re-establish their lives once released from the gulag. The title refers to a house near the gulag where wives of prisoners came for conjugal visits.

The book is in turn funny, sad, grim, and revolting.  At times the smells and violence of the gulag were enough to make me stop reading and look away.  What is interesting about House of Meetings compared to other gulag books such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is that the descriptions of life in and after the gulag are written not from the perspective of an intellectual, but that of another class of prisoner.  It describes well the relentlessness and helplessness of life under Soviet Communism, but does not offer hopes of redemption through art.

Amis manages to give his writing a Russian feel without resorting to imitation.  I thought the characters of Lev and the narrator were well developed across the course of this short book, but I found Zola a bit one-dimensional, especially considering she is so pivotal to the plot.  Having read House of Meetings I would be keen to read more of Martin Amis.

House of Meetings
Martin Amis
Vintage, 2007

the thoughtful dresser

The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant, is a thoughtful and readable discourse on the cultural importance of clothes and dress.  While it covers a lot of topics, from the old testament to shoes and Suzi Quattro, ultimately it is about how fashion and clothing can be used to create and express a self.

Grant draws on her own experiences, and on those of her parents, East European Jews who emigrated to Britain just prior to WWII, to explore how important clothing can be as a social marker, and as remnants of culture for immigrants (she also explores this in more depth in her novel The Clothes on Their Backs*).  Each chapter can almost stand on its own as a mini essay.  Three chapters, spaced at the beginning, middle and end of the book, document the life of Catherine Hill, a Holocaust survivor who tells the story of modifying her striped Auschwitz uniform as a defiance against a concentration camp system that defined her only by the number tattooed on her arm. Catherine Hill went on to be one of Canada’s most successful fashion buyers.

The writing is a bit uneven in this book, and some sections seem to have been less thoroughly worked and researched than others.  I felt I’d read some parts before, possibly because they were ideas that she explored in her column for The Guardian or on her blog.  But it was enjoyable and somewhat thought-provoking.  If you’re interested in clothing and fashion from more intellectual standpoint, but enjoy the frivolous side of it to, this is the perfect book for you.

*I should disclose that I won an autographed copy of  this book prior to publication through a competition on Linda Grant’s blog. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised that it was nominated for the Booker.

The Thoughtful Dresser
Linda Grant
Virago, 2009

goodbye columbus

Goodbye,Columbus (1959), is a novella with five short stories attached, and was Philip Roth’s first book.

The novella is set in 1950’s New Jersey, and describes a romance between an idealistic and disaffected young librarian, Neil Klugman, and Brenda Patimpkin, the spoilt daughter of a wealthy family.  Theirs is essentially a summer romance which is ultimately not strong enough to withstand the reality of their different outlooks and backgrounds. In parallel the story also explores assimilation and class issues in the emigrant Jewish community to which they both belong; and the dynamics of families.

In some ways Goodbye Columbus is a little dated – it’s easy to forget what a big deal sex outside of marriage was in the ’50s before the advent of contraception. But it’s still a really well written story, especially for a first-time author.  It describes beautifully the fragile and tentative beginnings of falling in love with someone, and the way this love is a creation of the lovers, talked into being and made more concrete than perhaps it is.  It also describes really well how people in a relationship can talk past one another and completely fail to communicate.  Neil Klugman is more likeable than many of Roth’s later male protagonists, and the thread of misogyny that runs through his other books is mostly absent from Goodbye Columbus.

The five short stories are also concerned with Jewish-American themes, but don’t sit well with the novella, I think because it isn’t possible to develop characters to the same extent in the space of a short story.

It’s worth reading just for Goodbye Columbus, which is thoughtful and satisfying, and shows Philip Roth’s talent as a writer.

Goodbye Columbus
Philip Roth
Penguin,1960

crabwalk

Gunter Grass is a major player in Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), a thorn in the side of the establishment, part of the establishment, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and a former Waffen SS member.  Like most of his books, Crabwalk explores the impacts of the past on the present.  The book is narrated by Paul Pokriefke, a journalist who is struggling to understand his relationships with his mother, his ex-wife, and his son who has committed a terrible crime.  As with all of Grass’s book the root of all these problems lie in past events that have been repressed or ignored.

In 1936, a Nazi party functionary, Wilhelm Gustloff, was killed by a Jewish student in Switzerland. He becomes a ‘martyr’ for the Nazi party, and a ship in the Strength Through Joy fleet is named after him. Paul Pokriefke’s mother, Tulla, has happy memories of cruising the Baltic on the Wilhelm Gustloff, but her obsession with the ship has deeper and darker origins.  In January 1945, when Danzig was surrounded by the Red Army, a heavily pregnant Tulla was one of over 10,000 refugees and soldiers who crammed aboard the ship to escape. The ship was torpedoed shortly after leaving shore, and over 9000 people died.  Paul was born, or so his mother tells him, at the moment the ship sank, his first cries mingling with those of thousands of children drowning in the freezing sea.

As Paul grows up in East Germany, his mother tells this story over and over.  The teenage Paul  thinks he has escaped his origins when he moves to West Berlin not long before the borders are closed.  But after German reunification in 1989, his mother is back, and so is the story.  By this time he’s married, has a son Konrad, and has divorced.  Konrad becomes Tulla’s audience for the telling and retelling of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, and he becomes obsessed with it, setting up a website chronicling the full story and calling for  recognition of the tragedy as a war crime.

On the site, Konrad debates with another young man, Wolfgang, who assumes the persona of the Jewish student who shot Wilhelm Gustloff. They agree to meet, in Schwerin, where Wilhelm Gustloff is buried.  Wolfgang spits on the memorial.  Konrad shoots and kills him.

During the trial, Paul Pokriefke struggles to understand how this happened.  His ex-wife blames him for being an absent father.  He blames his ex-wife for being too liberal.  Tulla defends Konrad’s actions and blames West Germany for ignoring the suffering of its citizens during the war, especially those like her who were permanently displaced from what is now Poland.  Paul, his ex-wife, and the dead boys parents meet in a bar after the verdict, collectively and awkwardly wondering how, when they thought they were doing everything right as parents, it seems they were doing everything wrong.

At the very end of the book, Paul visits his son in a juvenile detention centre several times.  Konrad has been building a model of the Wilhelm Gustloff, supplied by his grandmother.  On the last visit, he deliberately smashes it until his hand bleed, asking “are you happy now, dad?”.  On returning home and switching on his computer, Paul comes across a neo-nazi website that exalts the ‘martyrdom’ of Konrad Pokriefke. It doesn’t end, he thinks, it never will.

The title Crabwalk is a reference to the process of moving forwards while appearing to move backwards or sideways.  It echoes the way the characters need to scuttle back and forth across the wreckage of the past in order to understand the present disaster they find themselves in.  The German title is Krebsgang, and Krebs is also the German word for cancer.  I don’t know if that was a deliberate play on words by Grass, but it may well be a reference to the way that Germany’s continuing uneasy relationship with WWII and the divided years that followed, is eating away at the society from the inside.

Crabwalk is an enjoyable book.  The characters all have their flaws – Konrad is self-righteous, Paul is a bit of a loser, Tulla is slightly nuts – but they are well drawn.  Unlike Grass’s earlier books, which are very allegorical to the point of being slightly irritating, the metaphors and symbolism in this book are more subtle which allows the characters to shine through and be more like real people than are many in his earlier work.  The only slight wrong note was Grass inserting himself into the narrative as an unnamed older figure that Paul occasionally seeks guidance from in his writing.  I didn’t think this was needed.

Crabwalk
Gunter Grass
Faber, 2002

in search of a competent writer

In Search of an Impotent Man (Suche Impotenten Mann Fürs Leben) should be a refreshing change from the usual chick-lit plots.  Its heroine, Carmen, is smart, successful and gorgeous.  Tired of being treated as a sex object by her boyfriend, she gives him the boot and places an personal ad looking for an impotent man to share her life.  She gets an overwhelming response, but discovers that having given up on sex, she now really wants it.  In an added twist, the impotent man she’s most keen on turns out to have been faking his impotence all along.  And after many hi-jinks, they live happily ever after.

In Search of an Impotent Man has sold over a million copies, but this is in despite of, not because of, the poor execution of this great idea.  The book has two completely superfluous subplots involving a jewellery heist and a pregnant best friend; and the main plot has holes in it that warp the space-time continuum.  But mostly, the writing is just really bad.  At first I thought it was suffering from over-literal translation, but having read the German version of the book, I can confirm it’s bad in the original too.  Gaby Hauptmann will spend five paragraphs describing Carmen cooking some frozen calamari, and then in the next paragraph move the action on to the office a week later.  The dialogue is wooden and cheesy and the few attempts at scene setting are flat and commonplace.  It’s really clunky writing that made me want to get my red pen out and begin editing.

Carmen is a little one-dimensional, but she’s smart, canny and sharp,  and unlike most chicklit heroines she concentrates of having fun and celebrating her success rather than feeling sorry for herself.  The book would be better if there were fewer subplots, and more of Carmen’s inner life.  She deserves to be the creation of a better writer.

In Search of an Impotent Man / Suche Impotenten Mann furs Leben
Gabi Hauptmann
Virago, 1998 / Piper, 1995