Mohsin Hamid: THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST (4/5)

I started reading the novel out of sheer curiosity, having piqued my interest about what I thought it was all about: New York in the aftermath of 9/11. While the path taken by the main character was closely akin to the terrorist attacks on that fateful day of September 11, 2001, the novel is generally a depiction of a young Pakistani, Changez, who, at twenty two, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and hired by a pretigious New York finance firm from a hundred of applicants, has to find his self and foothold in life, later shaped by the converging, confluencing boulders clashing on him at that time: love, terrorism, US foreign policy, and the impending war between India and Pakistan.

Like Changez, Mr. Hamid is also a Princeton graduate. While there, he had the privilege to be under the tutelage of two famous and accomplished writers: Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison.

The style used in this novel is similar to Albert Camus's The Fall. It is a style where the narrator is talking to another person, but not in a conversational format: one voice, one perspective. The no-conversation conversation happened inside a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan. The adoption of this style is may be one of the reasons why the novel was shortlisted in 2007 Booker Prize. It did not win the award; maybe, some of the judges did not subscribe to the conclusion of the novel. As for me, notwithstanding whether we agree or not on the decisions Changez took, Mr. Hamid, though he reluctantly essayed it in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, wrote an elegiac to fundamental notions: the love we aspired for, the love we fight for, the love we cannot have.

Ian McEwan: ATONEMENT (5/5)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDEE, 2002

It was a hot day in 1935, in a countryside in England, at the brink of World War II. The day was opened with enthusiasm and closed by a crime, which sixty-four years later is still being atoned by the culprit.

Ian McEwan’s book, Atonement, while written exquisitely, is a page turner; and to my surprise, and much delight, at the end, I realized that the book used a metanarrative technique, a narrative that explains its narrative. The book itself is the atonement, part of the atonement, or perhaps, trying to be the instrument of the atonement.

Indeed, this is a supreme example of contemporary literature, written at the pinnacle of the writer’s narrative power, conjuring complex, expansive scope of guilt, shame, betrayal, and love, amid war and carnage.