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

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