the reluctant fundamentalist by mohsin hamid

Yet even as he recognizes the foibles of that ruling class, Changez, who comes from a high-status but downwardly mobile family, also aspires to join it. “I…found myself wondering by what quirk of human history my companions–many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they–were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class.” One the trip he is smitten with Erica, one of the other travelers, but is also bothered by his rich friends’ profligate spending and the condescension with which they give orders to anyone they’ve paid for a service. Starting with his job interview at Underwood Samson, a small firm that appraises businesses around the world, and a post-graduation trip to Greece with friends from Princeton, Changez maintains an outsider’s double perspective. However, his indoctrination was never total. For to be an American, he declares, is to view the world in a certain way–a perspective he absorbed in his eagerness to join the country’s elite. His resentment is at least in part self-loathing, directed at the American he’d been on his way to becoming. But Hamid’s novel, while it contains a few such moments, is distinguished by its portrayal of Changez’s class aspirations and inner struggle. It seems to have come as a surprise even to himself, and while hardly endearing, it sets his tale in motion.Ī less sophisticated author might have told a one-note story in which an immigrant’s experiences of discrimination and ignorance cause his alienation. He appears to have been something of an enigma until his reaction to the attacks–a sudden smile–pierces the shell. Fresh out of Princeton, he was living in New York City and working as a financial analyst. In 2001, as he explains, Changez was hardly a radical.

That monologue is the substance of Hamid’s elegant and chilling little novel.

Changez happens upon the American in Lahore, invites him to tea and tells him the story of his life in the months just before and after the attacks.

Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.” “I stared as one–and then the other–of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. While on a business trip to Manila, he turned on the television in his room and saw the towers fall. When I was a third of the way through Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the narrator, a young Pakistani man named Changez, tells the American stranger about how he first learned of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

The reluctant fundamentalist by mohsin hamid