What some critics have said about the novel: We have in this novel entered not one, but two, ingenious games. One of them Changez plays with the American, telling him stories which loop into other stories that change their pattern. The other Mohsin Hamid plays with his reader, daring us to separate what's true from what might not be in his narrator's confessions‌. Aamer Hussein, The Independent
Mohsin Hamid's second novel is an impressively intelligent thriller. It is short, but as it progresses a grim sense of foreboding thickens until the final sentence, which is a masterstroke of ambiguity. I closed the book with a shudder‌..While the "war on terror" rumbles on, this is a sharp, relevant book. Executed with cool control, it is a microcosm of the cankerous suspicion between East and West. Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph
A quietly told, cleverly constructed fable of infatuation and disenchantment with America, set on the treacherous fault lines of current east/west relations, and finely tuned to the ironies of mutual -- but especially American -- prejudice and misrepresentation. James Lasdun, The Guardian
Biblioteca Camp de l’Arpa-Caterina Albert The Reluctant Fundamentalist Mohsin Hamid Data: 11 de maig 2017 Hora: 19h Conductora: Pauline Ernest
THE AUTHOR Mohsin Hamid is a British Pakistani novelist and writer who was born in 1971. He has published 4 novels and a book of essays. He was born in Lahore and spent his childhood in Pakistan and the USA. He studied at Princetown University where he had authors Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates as his teachers and also attended Harvard Law School. He worked for several years as a management consultant in New York City, before moving to London in 2001 and became a dual citizen of the United Kingdom in 2006. He settled in Lahore with his family in 2009 and now divides his time between Pakistan, Great Britain and the USA. Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, published in 2000 and set in Lahore, is a story about an ex-banker who falls in love with his best friend's wife and becomes a heroin addict. It has an innovative structure, using multiple voices, and provides a contemporary vision of present day Pakistan which many considered has been missing previously in South Asian fiction. The novel became a cult hit in Pakistan and India, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award given to the best first novel in the USA, and was adapted for television in Pakistan and as an operetta in Italy. His second novel, the Reluctant Fundamentalist, was published in 2007 and became a international bestseller, reaching No.4 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won several awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. It was made into a film in 2012 and has been translated into over 25 languages. His third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, appeared in 2013. Like his previous books, this novel experiments with both genre and form. It tells the protagonist’s story from being an impoverished rural boy to becoming a tycoon in an unnamed contemporary city in Asia and also of his difficulties in searching for a nameless "pretty girl". Based on the format of the selfhelp books popular in Asia, the novel is light-hearted, but also profound in its portrayal of the lust for ambition and love in a time of extreme economic and social upheaval.
His fourth novel Exit West ( to be published in 2017) is about a young couple fleeing a ravaged city, at a time when migration is a major issue throughout the world. Hamid has also published a book of essays on life, art and politics: Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York and London, covering topics such as writing, migration, fatherhood, war and religion. His journalism and stories have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune amongst others. Hamid has described himself as a "mongrel" and has said of his own writing that "a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself." In 2013 he was named one of the world's 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine.
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST The novel takes place during the course of a single evening in an outdoor café in Lahore and is related in the second person. A Pakistani man called Changez is drinking coffee and eating dinner with an unnamed American. Changez describes his time as a student at Princeton University in New York, his successful job in a top consultancy company, his integration into American society and his relationship with Erika, an American girl mourning the death of her former boyfriend. He explains how the attacks of 11th September 2001 were a turning point for him, when he began to feel increasingly uncomfortable as a foreigner in the USA and as an employee of a company whose capitalist values he found increasingly difficult to accept. Against a background of wars between America and Afghanistan, and between India and Pakistan, and the news that Erika has gone missing, Chavez is fired from his job, and decides to leave America and return to Pakistan. After describing his current job in Lahore as a university lecturer, Chavez offers to walk the American back to his hotel. The novel’s ending and the true identity of the American are deliberately ambiguous. The author leaves it up to the reader to decide what the truth of the situation really is.