The Reluctant Fundamentalist
May. 28th, 2018 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearA friend recently gave me The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It's a short but very interesting work, telling the life story of a young man from Pakistan who goes to Princeton and joins a prestigious valuation firm in New York shortly before the 9/11 attacks. It's written in first person but addressed to an American that the narrator has met in a market in Lahore and invited to join him for dinner.
The tale of the narrator's changing views and attitudes towards America and the global political unrest of the early 2000s is masterfully told in terms of how the story progresses. He makes for a compelling narrator, and the underlying questions of what he is doing back in Pakistan, and where the apparently chance meeting with his audience will lead, are never far from the surface.
But the contrivance of the narrative was stretched a little too far for me. The frequent references to the American's actions and responses were too artificial, as the narrator's is the only voice we hear. So, it was a bit like a clumsy scene in a film where someone on the phone keeps repeating what the other person has said, so the audience can understand the conversation. This also extended to the whole setting, as the lengthy dinner and recounting of the narrator's background seemed very unrealistic to me, given what is suggested about the American's purpose in Lahore at the end.
So, while the story itself was intriguing and raised a lot of questions about the different sides of any conflict, the novel didn't really work for me, because the framing kept pulling me out of the narrative.
The tale of the narrator's changing views and attitudes towards America and the global political unrest of the early 2000s is masterfully told in terms of how the story progresses. He makes for a compelling narrator, and the underlying questions of what he is doing back in Pakistan, and where the apparently chance meeting with his audience will lead, are never far from the surface.
But the contrivance of the narrative was stretched a little too far for me. The frequent references to the American's actions and responses were too artificial, as the narrator's is the only voice we hear. So, it was a bit like a clumsy scene in a film where someone on the phone keeps repeating what the other person has said, so the audience can understand the conversation. This also extended to the whole setting, as the lengthy dinner and recounting of the narrator's background seemed very unrealistic to me, given what is suggested about the American's purpose in Lahore at the end.
So, while the story itself was intriguing and raised a lot of questions about the different sides of any conflict, the novel didn't really work for me, because the framing kept pulling me out of the narrative.
