Author: Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670081094
Description
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an American stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting…
Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by Underwood and Samson, an elite firm that specializes in ‘valuation’ of companies ripe for acquisition. He thrives on New York and the intensity of his work, and his infatuation with the beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a riveting and devastating exploration of our divided and yet ultimately indivisible world, with echoes of Fitzgerald and Camus.
Review:
‘A brilliant book. With spooky restraint and masterful control, Hamid unpicks the underpinnings of the most recent episode of distrust between East and West. But this book does not merely excel in capturing a developing bitterness. The narrative is balanced by a love as powerful as the sinister forces gathering, even when it recedes into a phantom of hope. It is this balance, and the constant negotiation of the political with the personal, that creates a nuanced and complex portrait of a reluctant fundamentalist.’
—Kiran Desai
‘Builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense . . . A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation’
—Kirkus Reviews