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Recommended Reading: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
May 23, 2007

It took me a while to pick up Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I've read several of the post-9/11 novels -- Jay McInerney's The Good Life, Ian McEwan's Saturday, Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children,S.J. Rozan's Absent Friends, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close -- and the only one that I truly thought was terrific was The Whole World Over by Julia Glass. I knew that Hamid's book was different  had to offer something new since he is a Muslim and a Pakistani who was educated at Princeton and now lives in London. His book, at the very least, would not be a white American's perspective on our brave new world.

                                                         

I also thought that this might be a tedious book (sorry, Harcourt!). It's that "fundamentalist" word. Yes, I was RELUCTANT to read a book about a FUNDAMENTALIST. Argh.

However, when I finally picked it up I didn't put it down again until I was finished. I read straight through a weekend. I was intrigued to find out in this interview that Hamid actually wrote and finished the first draft of the novel before 9/11 even happened. His protagonist, Changez, has returned to Lahore after years of being educated and working in the United States; his eerily calm monologue to an unseen American man through the course of dinner in a cafe nearly crackles out loud with tension. This is the most suspenseful book I've read since The Turn of the Screw.  

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on May 23, 2007 | Comments (1)