Mohsin Hamid Essay

Mohsin Hamid is the author of three impudents Moth Smoke (published in 2000), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award The reluctant fundamentalist (2007), a million-copy international topperseller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, made into a feature film, and named iodine of the rule books that delimitate the decade by the Guardian and, most recently, How to admit Filthy comfortable in Rising Asia (2013). His parable has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Review and been translated into everywhere 30 languages.The recipient of numerous awards, he has been called one of his generations most inventive and gifted writers by the New York Times, one of the most gifted and formally audacious writers of his generation by the Daily Telegraph, and one of the most important writers working right away by the Daily Beast. He also regularly writes es governs on themes ranging from literature to politics and is a reader to publications around the world, inclu ding the New York Times, the Guardian, the New York Review of Books, Dawn, and La Repubblica.A self-described mongrel, he was born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan, and has lived hale-nigh 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 senses) and often darkly amusing book about sex, drugs, and class warfare in postcolonial Asia. Hamid struc- tures Moth Smoke aboutwhat like a murder trial. On the stand is Daru, a cynical, hash-loving 28-year-old bank drone and onetime boxer now accused of running over a child.Daru relates his decline and fall after existence cauterised from the bank (a moment he compares to a quick sidestep in un- reality, like incuring your mother when youre tripping) in chapters that error with self-justifying monologues by the witnesses against him. Moth Smoke foregrounds Darus slacker predisposition and resentment toward the aristocr ats (with whom he associates but cannot join) against an apocalyptic place setting of nuclear testing reminiscent ofRobert Ald fertiles 1955 film-version take 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 clandestine investigative newsperson since moving back to Lahore, Pakistan, from New York. Their romance generates big heat 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, abrasion until both stop burning.Darus meager resources wane as the couples passion intensifies, and their family relationshipnot unlike that binding India to Pakistanthreatens to destroy ev eryone around them. Halfway through the book, to cool things off, Hamid tosses in an notwithstanding slightly ironic chapter titled what lovely weather were having (or the importance of air-conditioning), in which Darus causation economics professor discusses how Pakistans elite shake up managed to re-create for themselves the living conditions of say, Sweden, without leaving the dusty 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 spatial relation plummets even further when he becomes a part-time dealer to the rich kids who overpay for his wares. Maneuvering in the scope are the hardcore Islamic fundos, whose one-size-fits-all fanaticism, Hamid suggests, possesses seductive qualities no less compelling than Ozis self-righteous aria justifying his receive corruption (hes not a bad guy, he argues he just makes people jealous).As for Daru, Hami d leaves unclear whether its class rancor that drives him over the brink, or the displaced nurture he derives from bad-mother Mumtaz. The Falstaffian token of Murad Badshah, the rickshaw driver and dealer who enlists Daru in a wack scheme to knock over upscale boutiques, offers harlequinade relief. Armed robbery is like public speaking, says Murad. Both offer a brief period 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, botched outcome is pure Tarantino mishegaas.By novels end, the morally and fiscally 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 Empire of the Sun, the sort of slipstream masterpiece Hamid obviously admires. But Moth Smoke reads more 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 seemed to have achieved the improve American life. We know from the beginning, however, that it will not last long.Changez narrates his story from a cafe in Lahore, his birthplace, speckle speaking to an American man whose role is unclear. Changez discovers him, Yes, I was happy in that moment. I felt bathed in a warm sense of accomplishment. Nothing troubled me I was a young New Yorker with the urban center at my feet. (Tellingly, while he didnt see himself as a foreigner during this time, the both colleagues impending to him were also outsiders one non-white, the other a gay man who grew up poor. ) 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 tale of his romantic involvement with Erica, an neat and well-to-do New Yorker who has emotional baggage that eventually leads to a breakdown. The impossible love story softens the book, allowing Changez to tell the same story from a distinguishable perspective. Both of his potential conquests (America, Erica) have deep appeal, yet both have been damaged, make it impossible for them to be part of Changezs life. Hamids writing is strongest when Changez is analyzing the f iner points of being a foreigner, well-liked as an exotic acquaintance. When he goes out with Erica, he takes advantage of the ethnic exception 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 detail of his American life, he says, It was odd 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 clever tale lingers 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 realiz es that making it in America is not what he thought it was or what it used to be. The monologue form allows for an loose 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? Do his comments cause us to bristle, making us more and more uncomfortable? Extreme times call for entire reactions, extreme writing. Hamid has done 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 reading. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia The urban center of Rising Asia remains unnamed, 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 everyday occurrences. Written in a fast-paced, second-person memorial a la Jay McInerneys Bright Lights, Big City, we trac k our nameless hero, known simply as you, through his journey from poor rural boy to successful tycoon 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, infected with hepatitis E, living with his family of five in a cramped, one-room shanty. on that points nothing preferred about village life. Sex between his parents is a ritual undertaken entirely clothed and right neighboring to the children pretending to be asleep. But cleanse things lie ahead once the family migrates to the city, a place where sozzled neighborhoods are often divided by a single boulevard from factories and markets and graveyards . . separated from the homes of the impoverished nevertheless by an open sewer, railroad track, or na rrow alley. Its the bleak disparity between the rich and the poor that our hero is determined to cross in order to get filthy 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, Befriend 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 shift as a delivery boy of pirated DVDs. As a result, he meets his soulmate, known unless 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 searching his inner pinkish-orange 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 honors a better mate to run off with, a marketing manager in advertising.Lo ve, we are told, only dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught 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 fibbers lifes work, from street salesman of non-expired-labeled expired-goods to his true calling, the bottled-water trade a business so foul that he must lie, cheat, cook his books, make bribes, and sometimes murder it reveals a rather moving portrayal 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 staggering wealth becomes a quick plummet to the bottom. Theres an unfortunate side effect to a novel of such admirable ambition. Hamid attempts to find the world(a) in the non-specific. And its an experiment thats not completely 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 collimate 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 personality 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 genesis of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia springs from the idea that reading novels can at times tint like a form of self-help. We empathize 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 socialise 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.