rather successful experiment with second person narration, Succinct and ambitiously universal. I think you will like this, On the surface, this is the archetypal rags to riches, boy meets girl story, but it is also a vividly honest morality tale and social satire.
Written in the second person and historical present, the author draws 'you', the reader, into the unfolding drama, with its pretence of being a motivational 'getrich' guide.
It has the effect of being totally involving, cleverly undermining any preconceptions about the 'otherness' of a foreign culture.
The film is great, too!
ed on sitelinkwww, whichbook. net As soon as I started this book, I knew I was going to hate it, The secondperson was constantly grating, the "selfhelp" introductions to each chapter flippant and vaguely insulting, What shoddy gimmicks! Not to mention, I'd seen this story before: Kid grows up in a poor village, pulls himself out of the gutter, falls in love, ends up with all the trophies.
That's a staple storyline I'd read ten times since last Tuesday, But, alas: I was trapped on an airplane, the book was short, and I couldn't seem to sleep,
Luckily, the story moved fast and the spare prose was admirably consistent and readable, The bizarre secondperson became more comfortable, the "selfhelp" paragraphs still kitschy but less jarring, I just couldn't escape the feeling that it was going nowhere, If nothing else, I told myself, I had one more book against the reading challenge,
The tears caught me by surprise, It's hard to start crying on an airplane, with so many people so close, People invading personal bubbles playing Monster Truck Rally on their tablets coughing, sneezing, snoring, Yet, here I was, probably the only one on the plane to fit in the category "sobbing", What had just happened
By the last page, there's no question Hamid is a master, and manipulated the novel's structure to leave you utterly vulnerable, disarmed.
The gimmicks I had dismissed were my own undoing, and the variety of emotions that poured down during the final chapters brought out memories and feelings I was unprepared to handle, especially at,feet.
If the plane had landed at the same time I closed the book, I might have jumped to the front of the line to buy a ticket home that very evening, taking the redeye back for one more hug from those close to me.
This short novel packed the biggest emotional punch of anything I've read this year, I was shocked by how decisively my expectations were demolished, how effortlessly it captivated, enlightened, and loved, There is a great deal to unpack here you'll reexamine your job, your family, . . security environment government it's a cacophony of little punches, If you've ever made a hard choice about your future if you've ever worked too hard, loved too long, or missed too much this book will mean something to you.
This book is a selfhelp book, Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia.
And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mothers cot one cold, dewy morning.
Mohsin Hamid is one of those writers who gets better at every reread, Im not really sure if thats a compliment or not, given that not many people find themselves inclined to go back to books they didnt love in the first place.
The only reason I went back to sitelinkMoth Smoke was because I hadnt reviewed it the first time around, and its the same with this book.
If I hadnt had this compelling reason, I might never have opened any of Hamids works again, and might have missed the opportunity to enjoy it more fully.
And while one could make an argument for there being too many books on our ToRead list to bother with ones weve already read and discarded, Id say that some books get better as you get older, so that the things teenageyou didnt enjoy suddenly become much more nuanced.
Written in twelve parts, this particular story is written as a selfhelp guide, where you, the reader, are also the protagonist.
You travel from your fathers village to the metropolitan city, all the visual and auditory references clearly meant to mark it as an example of rural to urban migration in Pakistan.
There you experience Pakistans ridiculous public education system, join a religious organization in your university, and eventually become a rich if corrupt owner of a shady water bottling company.
Unfortunately, since the book is written at a distance, theres none of the introspective questioning over morality that I wanted to read about.
In fact, it feels like we experience a chunk of the story without actually establishing any emotional connection at all, which is one of the most major letdowns of the whole endeavor.
“The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually theyre not particularly fattening, So dont share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can, ”
Id be the first to point out that Hamids writing feels very contrived most of the times.
With almost all his books, you are constantly aware of his form of writing and the trick hes trying to play on the reader, which should detract from the experience, but somehow doesnt.
Im not sure how this happens, since usually I prefer the writing to be effortless and for the writer to be almost absent from the page, so that all thats alive to me are the characters.
But while this book constantly makes you aware that you are being talked to, the plot and characters are strong enough to carry the momentum forward until you forget how pretentious you found this very form of storytelling at the beginning.
Ill also say one thing: Mohsin Hamid has a great editor, As someone who is both a reader as well as an editor, here's something I always notice: long sentences are tricky little buggers.
But while this book indulges in them liberally, there was never any point where I felt the odd little hiccup that a misplaced comma or semi colon produces.
It was clean, faultless writing, all smooth transition from one idea to the next, In fact, I wouldnt be surprised if my enjoyment of this book had less to do with the characters and plot and more with how well structured each sentence felt.
Some sentences were even a whole paragraph longa writing trick Ive usually seen as not encouraged, and not usually well executed.
But its clear that in the hands of those who know how to write, it can work well,
I still didnt love the book, I think its just a matter of Hamid writing stories whose complexity of text I can admire without caring about the characters at all.
He doesnt manage to make me awed enough to recommend the book to others, and also doesnt create protagonists compelling enough to root for.
So while its a good book, for a passably good enough experience, I cant say much more than that.
ORIGINAL UPDATE:
How does Mohsin Hamid manage to get better every time I reread his books
to come.
I review Pakistani Fiction, and talk about Pakistani fiction, and want to talk to people who like to talk about fiction Pakistani and otherwise, take your pick.
To read more reviews or just contact me so you can talk about books, check out my sitelinkBlog or follow me on sitelinkTwitter!.
stars. Very entertaining and original. As well written as sitelinkThe Reluctant Terrorist by Hamid, This book is a selfhelp book, Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia.
And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother's cot one cold, dewy morning.
Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen.
This is all the more remarkable since you've never in your life seen any of these things, . .
ACE of sitelinkISBN The first thing you notice when you start Mohsin Hamids extraordinarily clever third novel is that its written in the second person.
Thats rare, even rarer than the firstperson plural, which we enjoyed in Jeffrey Eugenidess “The Virgin Suicides” and Eleanor Browns “The Weird Sisters.
” In fact, you cant remember reading anything narrated in the second person since Jay McInerneys “Bright Lights, Big City”, which you actually only pretended to have read after you saw the Michael J.
Foxmovie.
Why not just stick with the good old third person Dont you find the second person hard to tolerate the way it constantly reaches off the page and pokes you in the I
As it turns out, that sense of being directly addressed is what this author exploits so brilliantly in “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
” Hamid, who attended Princeton and Harvard and now lives in Pakistan, has taken the most American form of literature the selfhelp book and transformed it to tell the story of an ambitious man in the Third World.
Its a bizarre amalgam that looks like a parody of the genre from one angle and a melancholy reflection on modern life from another.
With a wink to Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey, Hamids chapter titles lead us inexorably toward success: “Move to the City,” “Get an Education,” “Learn from a Master.
” And he often strikes a perfect imitation of that overconfident, justbetweenus tone that has appealed to the desperate for generations: “To be effective, a selfhelp book requires two things.
First, the help it suggests should be helpful, Obviously. And second, without which the first is impossible, the self its trying to help should have some idea of what help is needed.
”
So true, so true, I can picture my lonely teenage self jotting that tautological wisdom down in my secret journal,
Working within the frame of a selfhelp book would seem constricting at best, annoying at worst, but Hamid tells a surprisingly moving story and crucially a short one.
His protagonist is never named, indeed, there arent any named people or places in this novel, although Hamid has spoken in interviews of the setting as Pakistan.
But the story manages to be both particular and broad at the same time,
The hero “You” is a sickly boy who might have been snuffed out, as so many others in his village are, by fever or hepatitis.
He and his family live in a single room, cook over a fire and drink from an open sewer.
Only by chance is he not “a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.
” One in a thousand, he escapes the deadliest risks of extreme poverty when his family crosses over “the yawning gap that exists between countryside and city.
” Suddenly, theyre living in a metropolitan area filled with the wonders of electricity and gaspowered cars, Forget New York: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,
But this is no granular report on what lies behind the beautiful forevers, Hamids method is glancing, often ironical, He sketches a “most unequal city” where rich and poor are swept together in “a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence.
” Smart and savage when he has to be, the boy thrives in school, starts delivering counterfeit DVDs, then “nonexpiredlabeled expiredgoods” and, finally, bottled and sometimes filtered water.
“You know quality matters,” the narrator notes, “especially for fakes, ”
Nothing we take for granted is in place here to encourage commerce or development, “Rampant nepotism,” bribes and corruption are the rule, Political parties are just rival gangs, assassins ride motorcycles down the crowded streets and terrorists bombs randomly rip apart lives and homes without any particular reason.
How quaint the challenges of life in the West seem against the background of this bloody chaos, through which hundreds of millions of people maneuver every day while staring up at American movie.
Yet Hamids tough hero never despairs or complains, Hes young Ben Franklin in Southeast Asia, “I want to be rich,” he tells a friend, and its just that simple a bittersweet echo of the American Dream, exported around the world like bottles of CocaCola.
What eventually gives the story such poignancy is the young mans unquenchable desire for “the pretty girl.
” “As far as getting
rich is concerned, love can be an impediment,” the narrator warns, “It dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught upriver journey to the heart of financial success.
”
And yet, once the boy spots the pretty girl, hes permanently smitten all through his filthy rise.
Worldly and sexually daring, shes on a much faster track, swept up in fashion and showbiz, “As with the sun,” the narrator notes, “you have always found it difficult to gaze upon her directly, ”
As the novel grows more melancholy, its ironic humor sloughs off, and were left with a tender love affair between two tired, old people, an antidote to that desperate desire for financial gain.
This deadly Asian story of how to succeed in business while really trying finally delivers You to a very different place than he set out to reach decades earlier.
Perhaps that shouldnt be surprising, After all, as the narrator tries to help us understand in the opening pages, “The idea of self in the land of selfhelp is a slippery one.
”.