The Reluctant Fundamentalist

"Shortlist"

"You’re right – the protagonist has a completely different profile from the humble one in Harbor . Changez is from a prestigious Pakistani family, but one without a lot of money. He comes to the United States to attend Princeton on a scholarship and then is recruited into the corporate world. The whole novel is a monologue. This character, in a café in Lahore, is talking to an unidentified American, telling his story about the life he led in the United States. How he was enamoured of New York, yet smiled as the Towers fell and grew even more embittered toward America in the wake of the attacks. The structure is original and well executed. It’s a window on the conflicted feelings that I encountered in reporting about America, at home and aboard – and what they grow out of. At the same time, it raises questions in the reader’s mind about who should be suspicious of whom and why. Definitely. A lot of political discourse is designed to force simple answers where there are none, or force people to take stark positions. In The Submission I wanted to re-complicate reactions to 9/11 so that even if you think you know what you think you still might find yourself switching your point of view."

"This is an amazing book, and it’s a shame that it didn’t win the Man Booker Prize [in 2007] – in my opinion it was the best of the bunch. I think it’s going to become a modern classic in five or 10 years’ time, if it’s not already regarded as one. This novel speaks for so many peoples’ experiences in the aftermath of 9/11 . The prose is very tight and the title is also very clever. The main character is a Pakistani man who had been living in the United States before 9/11. He sits with a stranger – who happens to be an American – in a café in Pakistan, and he describes how he felt harassed in the aftermath of the attack on the twin towers, to the point where he felt he had to leave. The entire book is narrated in the second person, and the listener is never heard from directly – it’s an approach that really draws the reader in. The ending is shrouded in mystery, as is the identity of the listener. During interviews, Hamid has refused to expand on his novel any further. In a way, I think that’s good. He leaves the issues surrounding the concept of “reluctant fundamentalism” as an open-ended debate, and it’s a debate that demands a certain type of polemic."

"Well, it’s an odd kind of book. I think what’s especially useful about it is the way in which it describes the transformation in this man’s thinking. The protagonist is somebody who had been living in New York and been a banker and he gradually turns into, as the title says, a reluctant fundamentalist. This is something that I have seen among my friends in Pakistan. People who I have always thought of as very, very Westernised. They went to school abroad and certainly didn’t have the habits of religious types. But they are increasingly angry with the West and sympathetic to an anti-Western agenda and propaganda and very receptive to all kind of thoughts. These are really rational people who will now tell me straight out that September 11 was actually perpetrated by the Israelis and had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda. To me their theories seem absolutely loony and yet these guys have come out with something radically different. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think there is this real sense that we Pakistanis and Indians don’t have a place at the table. The types of things that radicalise someone are, for example, going through passport control in JFK and they take you into a little room and start grilling you. And, clearly, the way that the Bush administration prosecuted the “War on Terror” with things like advocating torture in Guantanamo Bay – people have really taken this to heart and it’s led to a very sympathetic view of the radicals. I think to an American or English person it might be difficult to understand how it feels when your people are getting put in these kinds of situations. This is all about feeling solidarity with our fellow countrymen and it’s important for Westerners to try and understand what it feels like."