eager praise

This afternoon, during a prolonged break in my work when I was waiting for an enzyme to nibble away at the protein I'm studying, I went out to mail a little package to my sister containing a DVD with vacation photos that she has so far only seen on the miserable little screen of my brilliant little Eee. On the way back from the post office, I decided to pay a visit to the long-neglected Oxfam store.

The other day, on the way to lunch with coworkers, the shelves were being reorganizing. Books were scattered about in a state of such chaos that maximum entropy had clearly been reached. I wasn't presumptuous enough to expect to find anything, and I didn't go in. Add my recent vacation to that, and it has been a good four weeks since my setting foot into this most beloved of bookstores.

This afternoon, I went in. The shelves were orderly filled with the kind of eclectic selection that I'm used to and always looking forward to. There are some regulars like Alexander McCall Smith and Stephen Fry, but it's between them that I search, in the dark recesses where the treasures are hidden, the unassuming volumes that nevertheless stay for a day at best before finding a new home, the Chatwins, Capotes, Kureishis, and Steinbecks.

Today I made a catch whose true caliber was only revealed tonight when I dug deeper and deeper into it, eagerly turning page upon page. I had heard of The Reluctant Fundamentalist before. This book was hard to miss, always prominently displayed right near the entrance of each Waterstone's and with a title to invite speculation and stir interest. Plus it was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, with all the fanfare and publicity that this entailed. I had long been curious about it; today it was looking at me from a lower shelf and a second later it was mine.

As there was still a bit of time before my experiment needed my attention, I stopped by at Cafe Deco for a late lunch of cappuccino and a croissant aux amandes and read the first chapter in one breath. The book is slim and manageable. Its 200 pages make it a novella according to the blurb on the back cover, but the words are so big and the lines so far apart that one could be forgiven for calling it a humongous short story.

The writing is exquisite. It drew me in while I waited for my cappuccino to cool down to a drinkable temperature, and it swallowed me whole later at home. Changez, the protagonist and narrator, grew up in Pakistan, went to the US to get a degree from Princeton and started work at a consultancy. Surprisingly, we find him now back in Pakistan, sitting in a tea house in Lahore, where he tells a silent and rather mysterious American guest the story of his life in one epic uninterrupted soliloquacious dialog.

The story hinges on 9/11. Before that day, Changez happily and ambitiously followed what he saw as his destiny. Achieving, succeeding, integrating, and becoming more American every day. The terrorist attacks on America change everything, mostly because Changez realizes what's been hidden or suppressed deep inside him, his allegiances and his ties. His family is in Pakistan and his love and concern are with his country at a time when India is parading its army at the shared (or rather contested) border. The ostentatious indifference of the American government towards the brewing conflict drives him to question the validity of working in and for that country.

From a New Year's trip back to Pakistan he returns with a sprouting beard and even more doubts about his place in life. There is a haunting paragraph where Changez ponders the irony that the plane he's on is full of the brightest and fittest, the young elite in the making. While their country is on the verge of war, they all leave for comfortable lives in the US.

And so, as nothing really happens outside Changez's mind, things are coming undone. He abandons a consulting project in Chile that he was assigned to, is kicked out by his company and subsequently forced, by way of not meeting the employment requirements of his visa, to leave the US. Throughout all this, and until the very fitting ending of the novella, the suspense rises continuously but nearly silently. I found myself gripping the lean volume with a vigor I normally reserve for my bars when riding to work, and I was surprised when I noticed that. Not much happens until the end, and lots remains barely implied or entirely unsaid, but the mood of slow disenchantment in light of perceived injustices and inequities is masterfully captured, and the conflict builds densely and relentlessly.

I realize that my review gives the impression that the book is vitriolically anti-American, putting blame for all evils in the world on American actions. This is only because of my own ineptness with words, and I apologize. Mohsin Hamid, the author, is infinitely more accomplished and succeeds in painting a subtly nuanced picture. The truth in world politics is often in the beholder's eye. Hamid's great accomplishment is explaining credibly how Changez changes his point of view, how he discovers and develops his Pakistani identity, and how he slowly radicalizes. Even in the complete absence of religion as a mediating factor, such transitions appear not only possible but also nothing out of the ordinary.

With its meticulously composed sentences and intensely focused progress through the pages that grips the reader mercilessly but without overt climaxes or rushes, the book could best be described as a sort of parable, the dissection of a westernized, moderate Muslim's brain to show its undoing, at least from a western point of view. There is much more to think about in the book than there are sentences, but it's not a brainy book. It's simply fun to read, and it is so far the only book to appear on my lists of books I acquired and books I finished reading on the same day.