This is a good book. A really good book.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid was published in 2007 and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize that same year. It’s a story about a Pakistani man called Changez. One evening, in a café in Lahore, he meets an American man and Changez tells him the story of his time in New York – and what drove him back to Pakistan.
I was sucked in from the first page. Although I found the one-sided conversational style slightly awkward to start with, within a few pages I was used to it. Changez’s American companion is a paranoid and nervous character (who never speaks to the reader – the conversation is conveyed through Changez’s responses only) – a fitting representative of the general paranoia that swept the world after 9/11. From Changez, you get a sense of the frustration that many people in countries such as Pakistan must have felt (and probably still do) in the years since the terrorist attacks on the US.
Changez frustrated me in parts of the book. I couldn’t quite understand his tendency towards self-destruction. His demise was ultimately his own doing, certainly in his professional life, but eventually you get a sense of the importance of family to him and also his latent animosity towards America and its international clout – and how these drove him to make the decisions he made.
His fundamentalism is actually quite ambiguous. You never really get a sense of what his intentions are in his role as a reluctant fundamentalist – the title could mean anything. I think that makes the book’s message all the more powerful.
It’s a very political book, but I think it deserves to be read as much for its beautiful writing as its message.
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