Mohsin Hamid Essay

Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels Moth lowlife (published in 2000), a finalist for the frame/Hemingway Award The Reluctant fundamentalistic (2007), a million-copy international bestseller that was shortlisted for the Man booker Prize, made into a feature film, and named one of the books that defined the decade by the Guardian and, or so recently, How to progress to Filthy Rich in upgrade Asia (2013). His fiction has appe ard in the New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Re judgment and been translated into everyplace 30 languages.The recipient of numerous awards, he has been called one of his generations nigh inventive and gifted writers by the New York Times, one of the most intellectual and designally audacious writers of his generation by the Daily Telegraph, and one of the most important writers working today by the Daily Beast. He to a fault regularly writes essays on themes ranging from literature to politics and is a contri scarceor to publications most the wor ld, including the New York Times, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books, Dawn, and La Repubblica.A self-described mongrel, he was innate(p) in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan, and has lived about half his life there. The rest he has spent drifting between places such as London, New York, California, the Philippines, and Italy. Moth Smoke Moth Smoke is a steamy (in both backbones) and often evilly merry book about sex, drugs, and class warfare in postcolonial Asia. Hamid struc- tures Moth Smoke reasonably care a murder trial. On the stand is Daru, a cynical, hash-loving 28-year- elderly rim drone and onetime boxer now accused of fallning over a child.Daru relates his decline and fall after being fired from the savings bank (a arcsecond he compares to a quick sidestep in un- reality, like realiseing your mother when youre tripping) in chapters that alternate with self-justifying monologues by the witnesses against him. Moth Smoke foregrounds Darus slacker predisposition and re sentment toward the aristocrats (with whom he associates hardly can non join) against an apocalyptic stage setting of nuclear testing reminiscent ofRobert Aldrichs 1955 film-version handle onMickey Spillanes Kiss Me Deadly.An underdog redress occurs when Daru steals his rich best friend Ozis wife, Mumtaz, a iscontented young mother who has become a c disgraceestine fact- pay backing reporter since moving back to Lahore, Pakistan, from New York. Their ro troopsce generates big wake up and smoke and Hamid leaves no nook or cranny of the fire metaphor unexplored, reinvigorating its archetypal metaforce with everything from the titular play of moth and flame to the apocalyptic burnout of nuclear war. When Daru and Mumtaz meet for the first time, she leaves a smoldering cigarette butt in an ashtray bed. I crush mine into it, relates Daru, grinding until both stop burning.Darus paltry resources wane as the couples passion intensifies, and their relationship non unlike that binding India to Pakistanthreatens to destroy everyone around them. Halfway through the book, to cool it things off, Hamid tosses in an all slightly ironic chapter titled what lovely run were having (or the importance of air-conditioning), in which Darus former economics professor discusses how Pakistans elite have managed to re-create for themselves the living conditions of say, Sweden, without leaving the moth-eaten plains of the subcontinent.Although the novel is woozy with alcohol, hash, Ecstasy, and heroin, they serve less as pleasure vehicles than as tokens of societal decadence. Darus social status plummets even further when he becomes a reveal-time dealer to the rich kids who overpay for his wares. Maneuvering in the background are the hardcore Islamic fundos, whose one-size-fits-all fanaticism, Hamid suggests, possesses seductive qualities no less stimulate than Ozis self-righteous aria justifying his own corruption (hes not a bad guy, he argues he just discovers people jea lous).As for Daru, Hamid leaves undecipherable whether its class rancor that drives him over the brink, or the displaced nurture he derives from bad-mother Mumtaz. The Falstaffian figure of Murad Badshah, the rickshaw driver and dealer who enlists Daru in a wack scheme to knock over upscale boutiques, offers comedy relief. Armed robbery is like public oratory, says Murad. Both offer a brief expiration in the limelight, the risk of public humiliation, the opportunity for crowd control. Darus moment in the spotlight goes awry during a suspenseful scene whose panicky, fail outcome is pure Tarantino mishegaas.By novels end, the morally and pecuniaryly impoverished Daruall thirst, no quenching, and recently introduced to the joys of heroin smokeamuses himself by playing desultory games of moth badminton with the insects that have overtaken his barren home. The atmosphere is vacant and corrupt, the sense of loss reminiscent of the empty, overgrown swimming pools that populate J. G. Ballards pudding stone of the Sun, the sort of slipstream masterpiece Hamid obviously admires. just Moth Smoke contracts more(prenominal) than(prenominal) like a tough and sinewy B movie, the kind whose dark complexities expand the more you ponder it. The Reluctant FundamentalistSome books are acts of courage, maybe because the author tries out an unproven style, addresses an unpopular theme or allows characters to say things that no one wants to hear. Mohsin Hamids novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, does all those things. Told in the form of an extended monologue, the novel reflects on a young Pakistanis almost five years in America. After excelling at Princeton, Changez had become a highly regarded employee at a prestigious financial firm. He reckoned to have achieved the perfect American life. We know from the departning, however, that it will not last long.Changez narrates his myth from a cafe in Lahore, his birthplace, mend speaking to an American man whose role is unclear. Changez tells him, Yes, I was happy in that moment. I felt bathed in a warm sense of accomplishment. Nothing roiling me I was a young New Yorker with the city at my feet. (Tellingly, while he didnt see himself as a foreigner during this time, the devil colleagues closest to him were also outsiders one non-white, the other a gay man who grew up shortsighted. ) In the aftermath of Sept. 11, as the tone of the country becomes more hostile, Changezs corporate cloak lifts, and his life in America no longer seems so perfect.Paralleling the narrative of Changezs work life is the level of his romantic involvement with Erica, an elegant and well-to-do New Yorker who has emotional luggage that eventually leads to a breakdown. The impossible love story softens the book, allowing Changez to tell the like story from a different perspective. Both of his potential conquests (America, Erica) have dusky appeal, yet both have been damaged, making it impossible for them to be part of Changezs life. Hamids writing is strongest when Changez is analyzing the finer points of being a foreigner, well-liked as an exotic acquaintance. When he goes out with Erica, he takes advantage of the ethnic riddance clause that is written into every code of etiquette and wears a kurta and jeans because his blazer looks shabby. Later, when he is back in Pakistan and his parents ask for details of his American life, he says, It was left over(p) to speak of that world here, as it would be odd to sing in a mosque what is natural in one place can seem unnatural in another, and some concepts travel poorly, if at all. Perhaps as a result of speaking Urdu and English, Hamids style is delightfully distinct.His cagey tale lollygags in the mind, partly because of the nature and originality of the troubled love story and partly because of Changez himself, who is not always likable. Or noble. The courage of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is in the telling of a story about a Pakistani man who makes it and then throws it away because he doesnt want it anymore, because he realizes that making it in America is not what he thought it was or what it used to be. The monologue form allows for an intimate conversation, as the reader and the American listener become one.Are we sitting across from Changez at a table in Lahore, joining him in a sumptuous dinner party? Do his comments cause us to bristle, making us more and more uncomfortable? Extreme times call for extreme reactions, extreme writing. Hamid has through something extraordinary with this novel, and for those who want a different voice, a different view of the aftermath of 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is well worth interpreting. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia The city of Rising Asia remains nameless, but through the lens of Hamids critical eye, we understand it to be a metropolis closely resembling Lahore, Pakistan.Drones fly overhead. Corruption, terrorism, and violence are workaday occurrences. Writt en in a fast-paced, second-person narration a la Jay McInerneys Bright Lights, Big City, we track our nameless hero, known simply as you, through his journey from poor rural boy to successful office of a bottled-water empire. Similarly, Filthy Rich ends up being both a personal saga of love and ambition and a pointed satiric commentary on the head-turning changes in parts of the developing world.We first meet our hero as a child, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under his mothers cot one cold dewy morning. Hes sickly, give with hepatitis E, living with his family of five in a cramped, one-room shanty. Theres nobody desirable about village life. Sex between his parents is a religious rite undertaken entirely clothed and right next to the children pretending to be asleep. But better things lie ahead once the family migrates to the city, a place where wealthy neighborhoods are often divided by a single boulevard from factories and markets and graveyards . . separated from t he homes of the impoverished only by an open sewer, railroad track, or narrow alley. Its the bleak disparity between the rich and the poor that our hero is determined to cross in order to get fouled rich in rising Asia. Lest we forget, were still in the land of self-help, and in proper prescriptive fashion, each chapter homes in on a goal to improving ones station (Get an Education, bond a Bureaucrat, Dance with Debt) and each is a glimpse into our protagonists career at a different stage of life, from childhood to old age.He enters the workforce as a teenager, working the night parapraxis as a delivery boy of pirated DVDs. As a result, he meets his soulmate, known only as the pretty girl. She works at a beauty salon but is destined for bigger things. And hes a poor boy still wet behind the ears inquisitive his inner salmon for the proper motivation. Their relationship develops into a mutual crush, and she deflowers him, but this is a love that could never be, and she palpate s a better mate to run off with, a marketing manager in advertising.Love, we are told, only dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already troubled upriver journey to the heart of financial success. Hamids ear for replicating infomercial mumbo-jumbo is fine-tuned, producing some hilarious moments of dramatic irony. As the novel progresses through our cashiers lifes work, from street salesman of non-expired-labeled expired-goods to his true calling, the bottled-water trade a business so dirty that he must lie, cheat, cook his books, make bribes, and sometimes murder it reveals a rather moving portrait of a life lived in regret and denial.He marries the wrong woman, fails as a father to his only son, and once his bottled-water business becomes an empire, he loses it, and the rise toward stupefying wealth becomes a quick plummet to the bottom. Theres an unsuccessful side effect to a novel of such admirable ambition. Hamid attempts to find the universal in the non-specific. And its an experiment thats not altogether successful. With his intentional generality and the many nameless players you, your mother, your father, your wife, your brother-in-law Hamid has created a set of characters we begin to love but are unable to clearly see.But its the lifelong affair the narrator has with the pretty girl that helps us regain our focus time and again. Their lives parallel over the course of several decades. As he rises in business, his infatuation grows, and he tracks her career as a model on billboards, then as a TV character on his wifes favorite cooking show, then as a small-business owner in her own right. When the two come together, Hamid allows these scenes to linger pleasantly on, and in turn, his two characters appear at their most human.Hamid has admitted that the propagation of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia springs from the idea that reading novels can at times feel like a form of self-help. We e mpathize with a novels characters, seek their wisdom, experience their faults, find solace in their lives. Hamids novel embodies this concept in a tremendously profound and entertaining way, bringing to the page, front and center, why we read fiction at all. And the answer may very well be what his novel proposes to get someone who isnt yourself to help you.