The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid: book review

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is set in Lahore, Pakistan. The narrator, Changez, begins by approaching an American man in a café in the district of Old Anarkali.

The American is a stranger, but Changez offers to be of assistance to him. He begins a conversation, telling the stranger that he studied and worked in America. Changez was recruited to a valuation firm in New York after completing his university course – beating over a hundred students of the Princeton Class of 2001 to the job. He topped the intake of five trainees and the end of the induction period. Readers come to know that Changez, the Pakistani, is an elite scholar, working in a prestigious company with an excellent salary for a 22 year old. In a competitive business, the quiet Changez does extremely well. He is good at his job.

He falls in love with an American girl, Erica, whom he met when he was on holiday in Greece. He even meets her family who live in “an impressive building with a blue canopy and an elderly doorman.” Erica’s boyfriend, Chris, had died of lung cancer, and she found it hard to get over the grief of the love of her life. Changez tells the stranger about her and her love for Chris: “theirs had been an usual love, with such a degree of commingling of identities that when Chris died, Erica felt she had lost herself; even now, she said, she did not know if she could be found.” She could not be found – because she could not get over her grief, and admits herself into a clinic for recovery.

And then – New York was attacked. It was September 11, 2001. As both Changez and Erica fall apart, emotions are laid bare. Three years have passed and Changez returns to his home city Lahore, and to the time when the story starts, in the café with the American stranger.

It is a simple story with simple language. Yet it is evocative one minute and aloof the next, understandable one minute, mysterious the next. Rich in psychological suspense, it is intense to the end. A short read, but a good read.

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