This one comes down to personal taste. I don’t write very many reviews like this — where it’s clear the author was good with words and had a brain in his head, even some good things to say — but where I just can’t stand the way it’s presented. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I gather, was somewhat revelatory when it was first published, as it was among rare company in being a post-9/11 novel told from a non-white, non-American perspective. I don’t know very much about Mohsin […]
Who’s Reluctant? Who’s the Fundamentalist? And more questions…
I first read The Reluctant Fundamentalist three years ago for a seminar on literature and terrorism for my MA in English. It’s a beautifully rendered novel with a frame narrative, not unlike Marlow’s rendering of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. And really, there are more than a few analogies one could make with Conrad’s novella. Changez, the narrator of the novel, is living in Pakistan where he encounters an American stranger who appears to be more than just someone on a pleasure tour of Pakistan–post […]