![]() ![]() The problem with this monologue approach is that to convey the current setting, whatever drama there is also has to come via speech, and Hamid’s novel lets itself down here. He’s well spoken, has an extensive vocabulary, and an eye for detail, which you would expect given the nature of his job. ![]() But, when two planes hit the World Trade Center, Changez – as his name implies – changes.Ĭhangez’s dialogue makes for easy and quick reading. ![]() ![]() It’s a well paid job and, when not being professional, his private life is given over to the love of his life, Erica. Day gives way to night as Changez tells of his studies at Princeton and subsequent employment at Underwood Samson, a firm specialising in evaluating companies for potential acquisition. Told as a dramatic monologue, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, has Pakistani national, Changez (Urdu for Genghis), telling the story of his life to a nervous American over the table of a Lahore café. And like McEwan’s, it’s a slow burn affair that thrills throughout, although its conclusion frustrates more than disappoints. Given the brouhaha regarding the length of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (is it a novel? is it not?) Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, seems to have escaped similar accusations, itself weighing in under two hundred pages. ![]()
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