The
Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
This is an
amazing book, very well written and poignant, that tells of a young man
from Pakistan who wins a scholarship to Princeton and then gets a
prestigious job in New York. Set against the backdrop of “9/11”
his career as an analyst, discovering the fundamentals about companies, makes him reflect more widely on America, the new world he has
entered and the old world he left behind. It leads him to a crisis
and the rejection of the new world that he had initially embraced.
It
is a subtle and insightful critique of the USA and the post 9/11
foreign policy viewed from a sympathetic observer from another
culture.
The
story is also about boundaries and relationships as there is a
parallel personal narrative of his friendship and love of a
beautiful, but troubled young American woman.
It
is a very short book and I found the unusual style of telling the
story a little annoying at first but I was impressed by the ambiguity
of the ending.
One
of my favourite quotations from the book is - "Such journeys
have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's
boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a
relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as
the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.
Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now
within us."
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