1 and 2: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Spiral Road

[lyras.livejournal.com]

1. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

I enjoyed this - if you can use the word "enjoy" about such an uncomfortable book. It's a quick read, and I was immersed from the very beginning. Unlike other reviewers I've seen, the rather artificial set-up (Muslim man approaches Westerner sitting in cafe and keeps him talking by pouring out the story of his life in the USA) didn't bother me, because I was too interested in where the story was going.

My main disappointment was with the man's disaffection with the USA. While I have my own very clear ideas about why this might have happened, I didn't feel it was dealt with very clearly in the story. Perhaps that was intentional, but I found myself feeling a bit flat towards the end.

I was very frustrated with the ending, mainly because I didn't have a clue what had happened there. Did one of them kill (or at least attack/kidnap) the other? Or did they just walk away from each other? I really wasn't sure. Then I went online and discovered that Hamid had intended it to be ambiguous. "Depending on how the reader views the world in which the novel takes place, the reader can see the novel as a thriller or as an encounter between two rather odd gentlemen." (from an interview found here). Which made me feel a bit better, but still slightly cheated.

Overall, worth reading, but not a favourite.


2. Spiral Road by Adib Khan

"Masud Alam has lived in Australia for the past 30 of his 53 years. Now his father is dying‚ drifting in a haze of Alzheimer′s‚ and Masud has returned to Bangladesh to say goodbye and to reconnect with his family."

I know virtually nothing about Bangladesh, so I was always going to find this interesting, and the timing (post-911) made it even more fascinating. Masud is a fairly typical "blank" protagonist who has spent most of his life trying to escape his past, which includes fighting in Bangladesh's war of independence. As soon as he returns home, he is caught up in all sorts of intrigues, from his mother's attempted matchmaking to his brother's problematic business dealings to his nephew's worrying extremism.

I loved this book. The quietly wistful writing is just up my street, and despite knowing very little about the setting I was quickly drawn into Masud's world. I'll be looking for more of his work now.

Adib Khan was born in Bangladesh but has lived in Australia for over thirty years, and from what I can tell his stories focus on the clash of cultures and the question of home. He doesn't seem to be very well known, but I highly recommend him to people doing the 50 book challenge.

Comments

[the-merope.livejournal.com]

I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist many months ago. I wasn't sure whether I liked it or not. I liked the ambiguous ending, and I liked the meeting in Mexico? was it? which finally pushed him off his career. The disaffection I did feel came across all right: in my opinion/experience, it doesn't take that much, actually, to be disaffected with a place/culture, especially if you've unrealistic expectations of it.

But I didn't think Hamid handled the fundamentalism all that well. Perhaps I'm mistaken in my belief that disaffection and fundamentalism are very far apart on the same scale; for me to understand the protagonist's impulse to active- and violent- opposition instead of passive disaffection would have required greater passion from him. A passionate man who did not intend to oppose another culture, but finds himself doing so, I can sympathise- even empathise- with, a man without passion to fuel his opposition, who defines himself as 'fundamentalist', I can not. My problem was that he wasn't a fundamentalist; he was playing at being one. Or so I thought. That's always the risk, with trying to describe an extreme emotion or faith or action in the language of reasoned argument and logic; the two are essentially, mutually exclusive. At some point, there has to be a breakdown of the latter in order for the former to be affected. I thought Hamid tried to affect an extremism without it, and I thought it didn't work.

Not sure if I explained myself properly! I'd like to read Spiral Road at some point anyway. It sounds like quite a read.

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

These responses interest me, because at some point I decided that the way to make sense of the novel was to assume that the protagonist was an unreliable narrator. Not that the factual events he describes didn't happen, but that he's smoothing things out and making them seem more palatable to the man he's talking to; in particular, that he's playing down his own emotions. There are a couple of places where he raises his voice and starts ranting, and then cuts himself off and apologises; I think he has a lot of passion that he's hiding in order to present a particular image to the man he's talking to.

I mean, I agree that there's something a bit unsatisfactory about it, that it feels like a gap in the novel, but I was able to make it make sense in my head by opting for the "thriller" interpretation and thus assuming that there was More Going On. That may or may not be a cop-out.

[the-merope.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's interesting; I thought of the narrator as unreliable too, but what you took to be his honest moments were IMO the dishonest ones, and vice versa! I think the writer- Hamid- did intend for your interpretation, though. So insofar as a writer's intention makes the 'truth' in a work, I think you're probably right. But to me the whole thing was a play put on, by the author and by his character, which is what a fictional narrative is, of course, but I thought the fact that it was a play was too evident, and that it wasn't intended to be evident. I really, really liked the idea of the novel; it was ambitious to say the least, very pertinent and very, very fascinating, but I think a better novelist, or even Hamid if he tried again, could execute it better.

I didn't dislike the protagonist's effort to present his story in a way that he believed would be more ... palatable to his audience, or allow said audience to take him more seriously; I thought the dichotomy was maintained well enough, between his emotional outbursts and his anxiety to hide the outbursts; I simply didn't think the outbursts themselves were real; do you know what I mean?

PS: I have to admit I read the novel months ago, so I'm commenting from memory, of the book and my own reactions to it. I can't point out exactly what words or moments made me think such-and-such thing; I'm sorry!

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

I think I was enjoying the novel enough that I gave Hamid more slack than I might otherwise have done; somewhere along the line I must have figured out what he was aiming at and read it with that in mind, although even then I felt that the last segment of his reminiscences, the segment dealing with his leaving the US, was the least satisfactory. It felt a bit rushed, and that was the point where I really wanted the frame story to kick in and become the dominant element, so that something definite would happen, and the ambiguity would be resolved. I'm not against ambiguity in novels, but in this case I think it didn't really work.

I simply didn't think the outbursts themselves were real; do you know what I mean?

I do, yes, and there was something formulaic about them; and it's that transition from the cultured, Westernised, highly individual young man to the one-note ranter that's elided somewhat.